What is good code? If it gives the correct result, but takes a convulted route to get there, is the code good? I’ve maintained for years that if the code yields the correct result, the code is right, but it must be performant and written following best practices and coding guidelines to be good.
I’ve recently been doing maintance on an old application. This is a C# WinForms application. It uses Click Once for deployment and all data access is via WCF services connecting to SQL Server on an internal server. The nature of the maintance is to yank out all the WCF and replace with direct SQL calls. (It’s not that WCF is bad, but it’s over kill for this app and it was poorly implemented.) Yesterday, I came across two examples of bad programming. So bad, that I had to share.
Here’s the first. I was looking through the data update code and found a method in a particular class. The first line in the method is:
if (true)
Um.. ok. If anyone can make a case that true can be false, I’ll put this line of code back in.
The second is much worse. It was an overloaded class constructor. One of the overloads had 144 parameters. Yes, you read that right. 144 parameters. It was a class that mapped to a table in the database, each parameter is a field in the database. What did this method do? Saved the value of each field to a property on the object. This code was written pre-Entity Framework, but what’s wrong with using a DataTable and pass that around? Here’s some advice for you. Anytime you get more than four or five parameters, it’s time to rethink the entire structure of the method and maybe even the class itself.
I’m back working on the app today, but I’m almost afraid to go back in. I have no idea what else is lurking in the depths of this code.