ASP.NET MVC3 Partial View naming convention

It's not necessary to use an underscore, but it's a common convention for files which aren't meant to be served directly.

To solve this, you do have the option of returning a View or PartialView with the name of the view as a parameter.

return View("_List");

or

return PartialView("_List");

or inside another view

@{ Html.RenderPartial("_List"); }

If Partial view depends on ActionMethod and always render by Action method, you should same partial view name same as action method like this

public PartialViewResult List()     {        DoSomthing();        //PartialView() return a "List "Parial View          return PartialView();     }

but if your partial view not depends on the action method and directly call by view like this

@Html.RenderPartial("_List"); 

First, there is no shame to be new to any platform. And this was eight years ago so you are probably not new any more. You can use whatever naming conventions you want to use. I go with the original MVC naming convention which uses underscores (_) only for shared views. Partial views should be named after their actions. In your case the name of the view would be Action.cshtml unless this is a shared view of course.

My reasoning is simple. If you call View or PartialView from an action and don't provide a viewName, it assumes the name of the view is the name of the action. Also _Layout.cshtml is named with an underscore. This is because it is shared, not because it is a partial view. This mistake is all over the place in the MVC world. People are really zealously wrong about it. Don't know why. Naming convention is the shop's discretion.

The helper methods Html.RenderAction and Html.Action call actions on the controller. The helper methods Html.RenderPartial and Html.Partial allow you to pass a model directly to a Razor view without passing through an action.

One final thing, call Action instead of RenderAction. RenderAction is only called if you are already inside of a code block. This is almost never the case. I see people using RenderAction and then adding a code block around it unnecessarily just because the build breaks. These two following code snippets are exactly the same and the second one is way more readable in my opinion. I put the div to emphasize that the code is not in a code block:

<div>    @{ Html.RenderAction("List", "Student"); } </div>

<div>    @Html.Action("List", "Student")</div>

The bottom line is don't use underscores or curly braces unnecessarily. They are ugly characters and we should avoid them. ;)