It’s a phrase I’ve used many times: Writing code to write code. This time it was done to save my sanity. As is pretty evident in my blog, I am a VB.NET developer. Despite that, I can understand the shrinking usage of the language. Many of the newer technologies are simply not supporting VB.NET. And I guess to a certain degree, that’s fine. VB.NET will continue in the arena it is well suited for, and it won’t for newer application designs and models. So be it.
At my workplace, they’ve been a VB shop forever. And I was the longest holdout on that technology, but I’ve finally caved in to the reality that we’re going to have to convert to C#. It’s an ideal time as everything is kind of in a paused state. So I’ve been evaluating code converters and one that I tried ran for over 30 hours on our primary desktop application, then crashed with a useless error. in discussing this result with another developer, it was mentioned that C# is Option Strict always, which gave me an idea that the conversion was taking so long and maybe the crash was because the converter was attempting to resolve all the implicit conversions in the code. That’s something we should clean up first on our own.
I had a grand idea many years ago to get the project Option Strict compliant and I remember when I turned the option on, I was floored by the number of errors that needed resolved. You have to understand, this code is 15 years old, with a variety of developers at varying skill levels, and type safety has never been enforced. Further, all the state was held in datatables (in which everything is an object) and there are a plethora of ComboBoxes and DataGridViews, where everything is an object, too. So while bad coding practices were allowed, the architecture of the application worked against us as well.
When I committed to the fix and turned Option Strict on, I wasn’t prepared for the number of errors I had to fix. It was over 10,000. That’s 10k cases of implicit type conversion that need to be explicitly corrected. And that’s the easy route. Refactoring the code to actually use strong typing is essentially a rewrite. That’s not possible. I’m barely sure the refactoring is possible. But, I can turn Option Strict back off and return at a later time if absolutely needed.,
After about 1500 instances of typing CInt and CStr and CBool, I finally had enough. The difficult part was Ctrl-Shift-arrowing to get to the end of the element to be wrapped in the cast. Sometimes it was easy, and I got quite quick at hitting End and a closing parens, but it wasn’t quick enough. I needed to write an extension that would take whatever was highlighted and wrap it in a cast with a hotkey. And so that’s what I wrote.
Now, with my mouse, I can double-click and drag to select full words, then with Shift-Alt and a key, I can wrap that code. S for CStr, D for CDbl, B for CBool, etc. My productivity grew exponentially. Still though, I have about 8700 more fixes to get through. A few full days of that and I should be good to go.
