Using underscore to prefix private member fields

Joe Stagner blogged today about some basic coding guidelines one of which was to avoid using any sort of prefix for member variables (including the underscore). I personally prefer to use the underscore prefix on private member fields and mainly so they would be easily identifiable from local variables. But Joe’s guidelines suggested a workaround recommending that we use this to indicate a member variable.

private int _age;

void Foo()
{
    int age;
    //...
    if(age > _age) // <-- My way
    {
        //...
    }
}

private int age;

void Foo()
{
    int age;
    //...
    if(age > this.age) // <-- Joe's recommendation
    {
        //...
    }
}

While I did think that was a fair approach, I am still not convinced it’s fully alright since the onus is on the coder to remember to do this – there’s nothing stopping him from forgetting to prefix this for member fields. So for the time being I am going to continue using underscore for private members.