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Unmaintainable Code
I have several ways of categorizing code. Production quality, test, demo, and utilities. When I am talking about utilities, I am talking about little programs that I use to do all sorts of small tasks. There I rarely worry about maintainability, and today there was a gem here:
public delegate Control BuildSpecialCase(TextBox textbox);
private BuildSpecialCase GetSpecialCaseControl(string name)
{
if (name.IndexOf("ConnectionString", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) != -1)
{
return delegate(TextBox t)
{
Button change = new Button();
change.Click += delegate { t.Text = PromptForConnectionString(t.Text); };
change.Dock = DockStyle.Right;
change.Text = "...";
change.Width = 30;
return change;
};
}
if (name.IndexOf("File", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) != -1)
{
return delegate(TextBox t)
{
Button change = new Button();
change.Click += delegate
{
OpenFileDialog dialog = new OpenFileDialog();
dialog.Multiselect = false;
dialog.FileName = t.Text;
if (dialog.ShowDialog(this) == DialogResult.OK)
{
t.Text = dialog.FileName;
}
};
change.Dock = DockStyle.Right;
change.Text = "...";
change.Width = 30;
return change;
};
}
if (name.IndexOf("Folder", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) != -1 ||
name.IndexOf("Dir", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) != -1)
{
return delegate(TextBox t)
{
Button change = new Button();
change.Click += delegate
{
FolderBrowserDialog dialog = new FolderBrowserDialog();
dialog.SelectedPath = t.Text;
if (dialog.ShowDialog(this) == DialogResult.OK)
{
t.Text = dialog.SelectedPath;
}
};
change.Dock = DockStyle.Right;
change.Text = "...";
change.Width = 30;
return change;
};
}
return null;
}
Can you figure out what is going on?
As long as we are talking about unmaintainable code, here an example from code meant for production that I just wrote:
But for that I have tests :-)
Comments
That first bit of code is great... though I would throw that pesky BuildSpecialCase delegate away and return a Func<Control, TextBox> instead ;o)
I occasionally end up with similar generics "hell" in production code... it's one of the few places where I miss macros...
When I end up with generics like that, I usually make my self a class to neaten things up a bit.
Something like:
class NamedPolicyDictionary : Dictionary<Customer, PolicyDictionary>
{}
class PolicyDictionary : Dictionary<string, IList<Policy>
{}
So then you can do: NamedPolicyDictionary namedPoliciesByCustomers = new ...;
Ditto to what James said, I do the same thing. I rarely have any nested generics in production code. 3 nested generics I've never done. Too difficult to read, IMO.
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