Please do not get me wrong; C# is awesome. It is the language of my choice, even though I am pretty well versed in C++ and Java. That having been said, it cannot be denied that C# has its share of flaws, too. In this series of posts I am documenting some of them, in no particular order.

Also please note that some of the issues described here are Visual Studio bloopers, or DotNet bloopers, and not C#-in-general bloopers.

Introduction

Hail Mary local variable Initialization is the cargo cult programming practice of pre-initializing a local variable with some default value, “just in case”, even though that value will be overwritten in all code paths before it will be read. It is commonly done under the impression that it reduces the chances of error, but in reality it achieves the exact opposite: it increases the chances of error.

(When the class is public and the member is public, protected or protected internal.)

Before reading any further, please read the disclaimer.

The C# compiler is kind enough to give you a “field is never assigned to” warning if you forget to initialize a readonly member which is private or internal, or if the class in which it is being declared is internal. But if the class is public, and the readonly member is public, protected or protected internal, then no warning for you! Why, oh why?

Note: This post has been superseded by a new post in 2022. See Intertwine.

This is a C# project that I did back in 2011. It consists of a (rather informal) white paper which describes the project, and a zip file containing the source code in the form of a Microsoft Visual Studio solution.

Here is the abstract:

A mechanism is proposed for converting (entwining) method call invocations of any interface to a general purpose single-method normal form, and converting back (untwining) from the normal form to interface invocations, so that operations can be performed on the normal form in a way agnostic to the interface being invoked. The normal form is a delegate in C# or a functional interface in Java, realized as object AnyCall( int selector, object[] parameters ). A DotNet implementation is provided in C#, though the discussion also applies to Java.

If you are a developer with any real-world experience to speak of, you have undoubtedly come across the following situation: you made a change which was not meant to be committed, (for instance, some debug statement or some mock-up of functionality meant to be filled-in later,) and then you forgot about it and went ahead and committed all of your code. This mishap can be a cause of severe frustration for your fellow co-workers, and the source for memorable “WTF moments” for the QA department.

Solon’s original phrase was “Gerasko D’ Aei Polla Didaskomenos”, but here in Greece we use the shorter form, “Gerasko Aei Didaskomenos”. I grow older forever learning new things.

It is never too late to learn something new. For example, just a few months ago I learned of the existence of the “??” operator in C#, after several years of using the language. Of course I had come across that operator in the reference, but it had not occurred to me how useful it would be in real-life scenarios. Then, one day I chanced upon someone else’s code making use of it. There was a big ‘aha!’.