Best practice: ordering of public/protected/private within the class definition?

Question

I am starting a new project from the ground up and want it to be clean / have good coding standards. In what order do the seasoned developers on here like to lay things out

Answer 1

I think I have a different philosophy on this than most. I prefer to group related items together. I can't stand having to jump around to work with a class. The code should flow and using a rather artificial ordering based on accessibility (public, private, protected etc. ) or instance versus static or member versus property versus function doesn't help keep a nice flow. So if I nave a public method Method that is implemented by private helper methods HelperMethodA, HelperMethodB etc. then rather than have these method far apart from each other in the file, I will keep them close to each other. Similarly, if i have an instance method that is implemented by a static method, I will group these together too.

So my classes often look like this:

class MyClass {
    public string Method(int a) {
        return HelperMethodA(a) + HelperMethodB(this.SomeStringMember);
    }

    string HelperMethodA(int a) { // returns some string }

    string HelperMethodB(string s) { // returns some string }

    public bool Equals(MyClass other) { return MyClass.Equals(this, other); }

    public static bool Equals(MyClass left, MyClass right) { // return some bool }

    public double SomeCalculation(double x, double y) {
        if(x < 0) throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("x");
        return DoSomeCalculation(x, y); 
    }

    const double aConstant;
    const double anotherConstant;
    double DoSomeCalculation(double x, double y) {
        return Math.Pow(aConstant, x) * Math.Sin(y) 
            + this.SomeDoubleMember * anotherConstant;
    }       
}