>>>Do you do it? I've read in one Microsoft Press book not to if you don't need to, but read in another that you should. If you check the setting to treat all warnings as error in your project more than likely at some point you will be nagged about it if you don't.
>>
>>I think there used to be a performance hit, but with the latest version of dotnet, it is now optimized so it doesn't matter (or so I read somewhere and I cannot find it now). I haven't seen any benchmark tests on the latest version though that demonstrates either way.
>>
>>http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000343.html
>>
>>and the opposite view:
>>
>>http://visualstudiomagazine.com/columns/article.aspx?editorialsid=2377
>>
>>and then there is this problem (I recommend you read this; it's short too):
>>
>>http://blogs.msdn.com/abhinaba/archive/2005/11/08/490248.aspx
>>
>>and then perhaps it should be mentioned that notification depends on the level you set in the compiler.
>>
>>for class member variables, I tend to follow the field intializer example here:
>>
>>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/298183/c-member-variable-initialization-best-practice
>>
>>You might find this interesting, but it really has to do with optimizations that the compiler should be doing:
>>
>>http://akashkava.com/blog/?p=18
>
>Wow. I'll read those all when I get a chance. Thanks!

This is something that was researched and caused many discussions (with folks taking both sides) in my learning dotnet during the past couple of years. In a shop of developers, it can fall into the category of 'internal standards' when folks are adament that their way is the best.