VB Coding Code Guildlines

Some recently pointed out to me Cory Smith's Coding Guildlines for VB.NET and wondered why they weren't on the VB DevCenter.

Let me give you the easy answer.  Right now I am in the middle of this fun process called moving a wife, 3 kids (ages 5, 4, and 1), 2 dogs, and 3 cats from New Jersey to Washington.  As you can image fun tasks like having my septic tank pumped or dragging boxes of accumulated stuff that I can't figure out why I saved to the dumpster in front of the house have consumed large amounts of my free time.  So as a cheap cop out I haven't read up on the blogging world much in the past 24 hours.

Time pressures aside let me explain my deeper reasons.  While I agree with and practice about 90% or more of these guildlines, and would highly suggestion that you follow them if you are not, it is always a tough spot for a platform vendor.  At what point do we overstep our requirement to provide guidance on the platform and tools and become the code police?  At what point do people stop asking for more and start complaining we went to far?

 Intelligent people have vastly different views the farther out you go from the core guildlines, look no farther then the comment's on Brad Abram's similar C# Guidelines.  At the end of the day does it matter if you use 2, 3, or 4 spaces in your indent?  Most likely not.  IMHO some choices are best left up to the developer and the team, they know there needs the best.

While I congratulate Cory for an excellent job and I strongly encourage people to read and adapts these guidelines at the end of the day do what is right for environment and your team for readability and maintenance not because Microsoft or someone else told you to.