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Gary R. Wheeler wrote: An instance member marked private can be the lock value, manipulated solely by members of the class, like this
In your example, the lock is released between calls to the object's functions. If you used the Monitor.* functions, you could have have your code hold a lock when a function returns, but doing so would be even more dangerous than publicly exposing the lock object.
The main danger of publicly exposing a lock object is that there's no way the code for the class to protect against deadlock. Having a function which returns while a lock is held poses a much bigger danger, which is that the lock might be accidentally abandoned while it is held.
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My point is that the class manages the object the lock is protecting. All access to the object are through the class, so therefore the object is protected.
Publicly exposing a lock, or holding the lock across method calls, is insanely poor design.
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| Publicly exposing a lock, or holding the lock across method calls, is insanely poor design.
Agreed, but if one wishes to allow people to nicely enumerate collections I'm not sure there's always a good way around it. Personally, I wish that Microsoft's contract had allowed collections to be changed during an enumeration subject to some restrictions (basically, things which exist throughout an enumeration must be returned once; things that exist for part of an enumeration may be returned at most once) but that's not how Microsoft specified it.
I am well aware that locking a collection during enumeration is a dangerous recipe for deadlock, but there isn't always a practical alternative.
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To add to David's reply, the intention might have been to protect against two threads of the same program concurrently trying to delete the file (would work if both threads lock on the smae path instance).
Or maybe a generous hope that this gives him a somehow-transitional file system.
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Maybe the variable "path" is only used for locking against multiple threads running this at the same time. If they assign a value to the variable, that would be kinda weird. I use the "lock" keyword for multithreading, but I usually name the variable something like "padlock" and don't use it for anything else.
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Complements of a ball of VB6 mud:
6580 Exit Function
where 6580 is an automatically generated line number, starting from 1.
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Wes Jones wrote: starting from 1
that is where the horror is IMO; I don't mind line numbers, when present I want them to start at 1000 and increment by 10 though, using a fixed 4-digit format, and allowing for limited inserts without having to renumber all the time.
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles]
I only read formatted code with indentation, so please use PRE tags for code snippets.
I'm not participating in frackin' Q&A, so if you want my opinion, ask away in a real forum (or on my profile page).
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I guess somebody forgot to ask question "how many thousands of lines of code in one function is too many?"
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Everything that's over 9000 I figure.
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txtName being a text field:
txtName.Text.ToString() 
Noman Muhammad Aftab,
Software Mechanic
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Yeah, that's indeed quite insecure. Obviously you should Cstr() the thing and then Ctype it to string for good practice.
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I can't tell you how many times ive seen ToString() called on a string type. Its a typical newbie mistake, the lack of understanding of data types.
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I wonder if the person is trying to be paranoid-protective about the possibility that a property might return a type which is not a string, but features bidirectional widening conversions? As a hypothetical example, one might have a private string-interning pool. Properties of a class which would normally return string could instead return items from the pool. If the properties returned strings, then setting one such property to another would require generating a new string object and then doing some sort of dictionary lookup to locate the string in the pool. By contrast, if the objects returned intern-pool references, those steps could be eliminated.
One hazard with such an approach is that if such an object were passed to a function that expected something of type object, things would appear to work normally (the string would be extracted when the object was cast to a string) but the object that was kept would be a pool reference. This could cause an entire pool of interned strings to be kept alive even if there were no live references to anything that cared about the pool being a pool (just a reference to something thought to be a string).
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The sort of people who write myTextField.Text.ToString() would have no clue what you've just written.
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J4amieC wrote: The sort of people who write myTextField.Text.ToString() would have no clue what you've just written.
Naturally. On the other hand, they might have heard of some vaguely-similar situation in which a competent programmer who did understand what was going on had applied some seemingly-unnecessary cast, and figured that if a cast was needed there and they didn't understand any distinction between that case and the one at hand, they should apply a cast (or explicit ToString) in the present case as well.
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Now that reminds me of a time I had to maintain a (batch) program that accessed RDB. It had the equivalent of ToChar(ToChar(somestring)) all throughout the SQL code. The guy who had been maintaining it said it was that way when got it and that he was told it had to be that way.
I called BS, removed the extraneous ToChar, and proved that it was unnecessary. I made some other changes and added some functionality and the resulting program ran in a quarter of the time.
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J4amieC wrote: I can't tell you how many times ive seen ToString() called on a string type. Its a typical newbie mistake, the lack of understanding of data types.
To true. Great for catching newbies when conducting job interviews.
Luckily though, the framework protects them from themselves:
public override string ToString()
{
return this;
}
Not perfect but at least there's not a whole redundant complex conversion of some kind taking place...
Before .NET 4.0,
object Universe = NULL;
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I have being trying to modify a legecy vb com code. First of all, when it is vb you thing nothing can be right. Then you come across something that is shear madness
Public Function UpdateOrderState(ByVal oldState As Long, ByVal newState As Long)
Dim StockDir As Long, StockChange As Boolean
StockChange = True
Select Case 10 * oldState + newState
'Case 12, 32 added more options
Case 12, 32, 42, 52, 62, 72
StockDir = -1
'Case 21, 23 added more options
Case 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27
StockDir = 1
Case Else
StockChange = False
End Select
If StockChange Then
'Code removed
End If
End Function
What it is doing is that, it is trying to figure out a state change from one to another. All applicable states have values. Now, what if the value of the states change? 
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Yusuf wrote: Now, what if the value of the states change?
The code changes too! And on the plus side you get to recompile and deploy the new version.
That's what pros do 
Just an irritated, ranting son of ... an IT guy.
At your trolling services
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It's not even doing that much.... All it's doing is checking whether the state changed to/from 2 (Or neither)...
If oldState = newState Then
StockChange = False
Else if oldState = StockStates.WhateverTheHell2Means Then
StockDir = 1
Else if newState = StockStates.WhateverTheHell2Means Then
StockDir = -1
End If
Don't ya just hate legacy code?
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Ian Shlasko wrote: Don't ya just hate crappy legacy code?
ftfy
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I wonder if you ran code obfuscation on it, would it produce more readable code? 
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DaveIf this helped, please vote & accept answer!
Binging is like googling, it just feels dirtier. (Pete O'Hanlon)
BTW, in software, hope and pray is not a viable strategy. (Luc Pattyn)
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This looks crazy ... but I would not blame the programming language, the original developer of this piece of ... code? ... will write bad code in any language.
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