A Type of HPC

Matteo‘s company hired a Highly Paid Consultant. The HPC came in, took one look at their C# codebase, and said, “You’re doing everything wrong. But don’t worry, I can fix it!”

So he “fixed” it.

For example, what if you had a string, and needed to parse it to some concrete type. Why, you just do this:

public static T ToType<T>(this string value, T defaultValue)
{
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(value))
        {
                return defaultValue;
        }

        T result = defaultValue;

        try
        {
                result = (T) Convert.ChangeType(value, typeof (T));
        }
        catch
        {
        }

        return result;
}

This particular code doesn’t do very much at all- a basic null check followed by an attempt to convert, a swallowed exception and a default value output. There are built-in methods, like Int32.TryParse, but that wouldn’t work well with using generics. I don’t love it, but it’s not WTF.

public static T? ToNullable<T>(this string value) where T : struct
{
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(value))
        {
                return null;
        }

        T? result = null;

        try
        {
                result = (T) Convert.ChangeType(value, typeof (T));
        }
        catch
        {
        }

        return result;
}

It’s the same method, but this time where the default value is a nulled nullable. The real bonus here is that this time, they qualified the generic to require it to be a struct– which in C# terms actually requires it to be a “value type”. Which, as an aside, Convert.ChangeType requires its type parameter to be a value type- which means for consistency, they probably should have put that qualifier on ToType.

Again, this code, alone, isn’t really a full on WTF. So we need to put it into context: this is the Highly Paid Consultant’s home-grown JSON library, which handles both parsing and generating JSON.

Now, we’re getting the sense that someone’s been reinventing the wheel, awkwardly. So let’s look at one last method- ToJS. What do you think ToJS does? If you said, “clearly, this must be what converts an object to JSON”, you’d be wrong.

public static string ToJS(this string text)
{
        return text.Replace(@"", @"\")
                .Replace(@"'", @"'")
                .Replace(""", "\"");
}

This just escapes your strings for you.

There’s one last piece of context: all of the code this developer wrote, every method that could throw an exception had a handy, dandy, exception handler. That handler logged the exception and did nothing else.

Like a damp fart, the HPC hung around the office for awhile, and then slowly dissipated to another contract. The stench, however, is going to take Matteo some scrubbing to remove.