Warn Developers about Using Your Old Code
At least two or three times in my life, I've come back to old systems I'd worked on and realized that I now knew a better way of doing things. However, rather than just revise existing code, that "better way of doing things" required me to write a new method, property or class. When I released my new code out into the world, I wanted to tell other developers to stop using my old code and move to my new code. The best way to do that, I've decided, is to go back to the old code and decorate it with the Obsolete attribute.
You can add the Obsolete attribute either to a class or to members of a class. Regardless, when a developer attempts to use the item you've decorated, they'll get a warning message in their code that says the class (or the member) you've decorated with the attribute is deprecated.
Of course, developers aren't likely to stop using your class or method unless you tell them about your alternative. You can do that by passing a message to the Obsolete attribute -- that message is then tacked onto the end of the attribute's default warning message. This example will generate the message "'SampleClass' is obsolete: Use PHVIS.NewClass" when someone tries to use SampleClass:
<Obsolete("Use PHVIS.NewClass")>
Public Class SampleClass
Public Sub SampleMethod()
End Sub
End Class
By default, the Obsolete attribute just generates a warning message so it won't stop the developer's code from compiling. If you want to be more aggressive, you can pass True as the attribute's second parameter to generate a compile-time error and prevent the developer's code from compiling, as this example does:
Public Class SampleClass
<Obsolete("Use BetterMethod", True)>
Public Sub SampleMethod()
End Sub
End Class
I'd wait awhile before doing that, though.
Posted by Peter Vogel on 12/17/2015