What are the naming guidelines for ASP.NET controls?

The reason Visual Studio adds "TextBox1" when you add it to the page is because Microsoft has no way of knowing how you intend to use it. Naming it "Control1" would be too confusing because it could be any number of controls.

Microsoft provides guidance in general for OO naming conventions, but not specifically for naming UI controls. Since UI controls are ultimately variables used in code, they should follow the same convention as any other variable - no hungarian notation prefix.

• msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xzf533w0(vs.71)
• msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229002(VS.80)

The main reasons are...

• Type of control may change from textbox to listbox, then all associated code will have to be fixed (noted earlier)
• Your code should be more concerned with the content of the control and less with what type of control it is. When you are concerned with the type of the control, you start to depend on certain functionalities and you break encapsulation - you should be able to easily swap controls without changing much or any code. (Basic OOP principle)
• It is fairly easy to come up with prefixes for the standard controls, but new controls are being developed every day. You may make your own WebUserControl, or you may purchase a set of third party controls. How will you decide which prefix to use for the custom controls? Instead of focusing on the type of control, your code should be concerned with what information is contained in it.

Examples

• txtFirstName => firstName or FirstName
• txtState => state or State
• cboState => state or State (prime example of changing control types what about lstState or rdoState - they should all have the same name because your code is not concerned about the type of control,rather the state the user selected)
• ctlBilling => billingAddress or BillingAddress (custom control - with hungarian notation it is not very evident what the control even is, but with a meaningful name I begin to understand the information contained in it. i.e. billingAddress.Street, billingAddress.FullAddress etc.)

Not sure about Microsoft official standards, but this is what i've done through out my development career.

I generally abbreviate the control type in front of the the name of what the control does.I keep the abbreviation lower case and the control's name CamelCase.

E.g. A texbox for username becomes tbUserName

Here is a list of standard abbreviations I use:

Abbr     -  Controlbtn  -  Buttoncb   -  CheckBoxcbl  -  CheckBoxListdd   -  DropDownListgv   -  GridViewhl   -  Hyperlinkimg  -  Imageib   -  ImageButtonlbl  -  Labellbtn -  LinkButtonlb   -  ListBoxlit  -  Literalpnl  -  Panelph   -  PlaceHolderrb   -  RadioButtonrbl  -  RadioButtonListtxt  -  Textbox

I find that most of the time I care about what kind of information the control is for rather than what control type is currently being used to capture that data, so I prefer the type of information before the control type, so I can find it in a sorted list in the IDE:

• AgeRangeDropDownList
• AgreedToTermsCheckBox
• FirstNameTextBox
• LastNameTextBox

VS:

• chkAgreedToTerms
• ddlAgeRange
• txtFirstName
• txtLastName