>I've been thinking lately about Best Practices. What does this term mean to you? Are there any Best Practices that you follow?

I just stole this from our internal Wiki (thanks to Steve Sawyer, I'm pretty sure he created this topic):

Best Practices are techniques which have shown, through experience, to yield applications which, at the source level are more readable, maintainable and therefore more stable and of higher quality than those that do not employ these practices.

Best Practices are not a matter of opinion, for the most part. They are not a matter of style. They are an issue of quality and consistency.

Best Practices are most often defined by those who have, over many years, made the mistakes that make the applications they write more difficult to maintain, and vow to adopt practices which ease this pain. Those who have created applications which they have not been required to maintain never come to an understanding of Best Practices. This is most commonly seen in programmers or analysts that do design or "rough-in" code, leaving the fit and finish to others, where problems in the initial design and poor coding practices become most apparent.