Update coding guidelines for control statement formatting

[Nigusu-Allehu]

Bug

Fixes: #6804 (comment)

Description

Update coding guidelines as discussed in #6804 (comment)

PR Checklist

• Meaningful title, helpful description and a linked NuGet/Home issue
• Added tests
• Link to an issue or pull request to update docs if this PR changes settings, environment variables, new feature, etc.

[donnie-msft]

While I overall don't see that a problem exists today with spacing with if-statements, have we looked into Roslyn analyzers first before taking an AI approach? As others pointed out, there's a lot of cases where we would not want extra spacing.

[donnie-msft]

We discussed offline - I'm neutral on this so if it's important to others to have a rigid guideline here, I'll trust you'll work out the right strategy.

Discussed offline

[jebriede]

It looks like this is the only "Don't" example: a time when blank lines would not be appropriate. However, this example introduces blank lines in the middle of the code block which is not part of the proposed guideline so it's showing an example that isn't an exception to the proposal. The proposed guideline is to put spaces before a control block separating any statements above it.

[jebriede]

In some cases, this is true. In others, I disagree as I mentioned in our meeting yesterday. In some cases, a statement and a control block serve as a group of code that is best read when together, without excessive blank spaces, such as in this contrived code example:

public int CalculateScore(int points, int modifier)
{
    List<Player> activePlayers = GetActivePlayers();
    if (activePlayers.Count == 0)
    {
        return -1;
    }

    int score = points * modifier;
    if (score > 1000) {
        score = 1000; // score capped at 1000.
    }

    return score;
}

[jebriede]

I do agree with having a blank space between control blocks. This can be handled with a coding guideline (and analyzer) to ensure that there is a blank line after every control block unless that next line is a curly brace closing another block.

[jebriede]

This example introduces a different issue than what the proposal is talking about. The issue of brace placement and spacing between braces should not be part of this example and should be demonstrated separately in a different coding guideline.

[dotnet-policy-service]

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