What is the quickest way to determine which members of an enum are not being used?
Comment the enum members out one by one and see if your code compiles. If compilation breaks, the member is used. Although this method only catches compile-time use of your enums. They could be used at runtime.
If you're using ReSharper, click on the enum to check, hit Alt+F7 (Shift+F12 if you're using VS shortcuts), and it'll give you a list of every place it's used in your entire solution.
Being on the safe side you can mark your members with ObsoleteAttribute. Adding [Obsolete(true)] will fail the build if given member is used.
This can obviously be used not only for enums but for nearly anything in .NET.
Resharper is your tool of choice if you need to delete the members from a solution and you're not worried about another uses in different solutions.
Using find references on each member of the enum is the fastest way I can think of.
Ctrl-F and search the entire namespace/project for that member of enum
If you are using VS2005/8 Ctrl-Shift-F so search in the files. This will give you a list of files that you can double-click to goto the lines.
If you don't use VS then you can use WinGrep which will do the same thing (without the double-click feature)
Commenting / uncommenting members. If the compiler does not throw an error the enum member is not used.
Update: As mentioned in the comments this of course only works for projects contained in the solution / the active build configuration. The same holds for the Find References and Ctrl+F methods.
Otherwise there is also the option to do a file search, e.g. using grep. However, this option only allows to do a string-based search and does not resolve any types.
Related
The name of one of my classes was changed and I can't change it back. I have to mantain backwards compatibility and I don't want to write an wrapper with the old name.
Is there any easy way to give a class 2 names or to give it an alias?
Lifted from a comment by the OP:
Don't tell me to use the using directive since it must be done in the consumer side, and I don't want to change the projects that are using my library.
Arguably, your best option is to use a refactoring tool (like Resharper) to help you automate the conversion from the old name to the new name. However, if this is untenable to you for some reason, here are some alternatives:
If the types are in different assemblies you may be able to use a Type Forwarder. These allow you to redirect all references for a given type to an assembly ... but if IIRC, they can also redirect them to a new name as well.
Otherwise, within a single .cs source file you can apply a using statement:
using OldClassName = SomeNameSpace.NewClassName
This doesn't solve the problem globally, however, as it may become painful to change many .cs files to include this using statement.
Another alternative, may be to create a sub-class of the new type and name it the old name:
public class OldClassName : NewClassName
This gives you aliasing for the new class, but will require that you create duplicate public constructors and proxy static method calls to the renamed type. This is far from ideal ... and I generally don't recommend this.
Unfortunately, as the library author, the only way is X inherits Y, which has certain caveats.
It's possible but unlikely you could cheat with IL assembly.
I'm a C#/.net/Visual Studio noob. I inherited a half-completed C# application for a mobile phone. In the course of debugging, I came across several half-finished classes that don't seem to be used anywhere else in the code. Is there a way to get determine if a class definition is instantiated anywhere?
The quickest way (in Visual Studio) is to right-click the type name and select Find all references from the context menu. This will show you all places where that type is referenced in the current solution.
You should get Resharper - it will show "dead" code in grey and make refactoring a lot easier! You may also prefer CodeRush.
Without ReSharper or a similar tool, you can always do a file search for "new ClassName(" in the entire solution.
I usually start with Shift-F12 (or right-click on class name and select "Find All References")
Unless you know the code, and the modules that may use it., CodeRush or Resharper are your better choices.
None of the other answers mentioned the modifiers which can be applied to classes/functions. You certainly want to take scope into consideration before deleting code. You may have other assemblies which use classes/functions.
Remove them from the project and let your unit tests (ahem, you have those right?) and your QA team (you have that right?) identify the problems.
Jokes aside, if it's SO obvious that it's not complete, why not simply remove the code and recompile?
The next steps I would take would be to use a tool like "Find All References" or Resharper (does it even have a feature to do that?)
You can list all the classes (searching for class [a-zA-Z0-9_]+), and then search for new <classname>. The ones not found at the second search are not used. Of course, a simple script in your favourite script language would help.
You'll need however to filter out the classes that are used as base classes of used classes.
Note that this way you'll not find the classes which are used only from unused classes, so several iterations might be needed. Moreover, if some two classes are using each other (but not used from outside), removing them might need additional effort.
Edit:
A better approach would be building dependency tree: for each of the classes you define which class is used by that class, and which class is a base class for that class. This way you find which classes are required for every single class. Then, you can define which classes are required (directly or indirectly) from the class containing Main. All other classes are "unreachable" and therefore not used.
This approach will however remove the classes instantiated by reflection. Well, there is no way to find out at compile time, which classes are going to be instantiated by reflection anyway.
Maybe using the ready tools (like others proposed) is a simpler alternative.
What tools or techniques do you recommend for discovering C# extension methods in code? They're in the right namespace, but may be in any file in the solution.
Specifically:
How can I find all extension methods (and navigate to them) on the current type in the code window?
I do have Resharper (v4), so if that has a mechanism I'm not aware of - please share!
If you have the source then you can search for this Type identifier using regular expressions. Considering the fact that it has to be the first parameter to the function something like this should do the trick:
\(this:b+:i:b+:i
At least this way you can discover where the extensions methods are defined and add that namespace, then rely on intellisense. Just ran this on a non-trivial project with lots of extensions methods everywhere and it worked a treat. The only false positive was something like this:
if(this is Blah...
Which we can fix by adding static to our search since the extension methods have to be static:
static.*\(this:b+:i:b+:i
This won't work for cases like this:
public
static ExtensionMethod(
this int
iVal) {
}
But that's kind of the limitation of regular expressions. I am sure certain somebodies can tell you all about the pain of using regular expressions to parse a language.
Now, what I think is missing from the IDE is the ability to recognise the extension methods that are in a non-imported namespace. Similar to when you know the classname, if you type it up, the IDE will give you a hint to either use it explicitly or import the namespace. After all, that's how I import all my namespaces and frequently find myself trying to do the same to extension methods.
This is pretty low-tech, but how about Ctrl-F searching for "this:b+MyClassName" ?
If you are using VS which I guess you are intellisense will show all the avialable extensionmethod for a given object for you (marked with a blue thingy added to the usual instance method icon). That list might differ from file to file (a mthod called aMethod might mean two different things in two different files) eventhough the object type is the same (which is based on the way extension methods are found)
If you've got resharper, just hold down the ctrl key and click on the method.
If you have installed the ILSpy extension in Visual Studio (I am using 2022) then you can:
Right click on the class/type and select -> Open code in ILSpy
In ILSpy right click on the type and select -> Analyze
In the Analyze window you will see a node "Extension methods" (if any exists, else no node is shown)
does anyone know of a way to split all classes in one solution into multiple files?
The point here is that I've inherited a project in which a few hundred files contain a thousand or so classes...
I'd like to be able to get to a 1 file per class approach..
Using resharper I can easily do this manually, but I'm guessing there must be a better way?
Kind regards
Frederik
You could try one of the ReSharper 5.0 nightly builds which allow you to do it across your whole solution. You can revert to ReSharper 4.5 (or whatever version you are using) afterwards.
GraemeF's answer is correct, but when you do that refactoring chances are you'll lose all source-control history for the existing classes. This might not be a problem for you (especially if the system you've inherited wasn't source-controlled!) but I've often found that line-annotated views of a class are very helpful for determining the intent behind a particular line.
ReSharper has the Ctrl-T shortcut to jump to a type name, and holding down Ctrl makes types clickable; that might be another way to solve your problem.
I've recently found the need to check at compile-time whether either: a) a certain assembly reference exists and can be successfully resolved, or b) a certain class (whose fully qualified name is known) is defined. These two situations are equivalent for my purposes, so being able to check for one of them would be good enough. Is there any way to do this in .NET/C#? Preprocessor directives initially struck me as something that might help, but it seems it doesn't have the necessary capability.
Of course, checking for the existence of a type at runtime can be done easily enough, but unfortunately that won't resolve my particular problem in this situation. (I need to be able to ignore the fact that a certain reference is missing and thus fall-back to another approach in code.)
Is there a reason you can't add a reference and then use a typeof expression on a type from the assembly to verify it's available?
var x = typeof(SomeTypeInSomeAssembly);
If the assembly containing SomeTypeInSomeAssembly is not referenced and available this will not compile.
It sounds like you want the compiler to ignore one branch of code, which is really only doable by hiding it behind an #if block. Would defining a compiler constant and using #if work for your purposes?
#if MyConstant
.... code here that uses the type ....
#else
.... workaround code ....
#endif
Another option would be to not depend on the other class at compile-time at all, and use reflection or the .NET 4.0 dynamic keyword to use it. If it'll be called repeatedly in a perf-critical scenario in .NET 3.5 or earlier, you could use DynamicMethod to build your code on first use instead of using reflection every time.
I seem to have found a solution here, albeit not precisely for what I was initially hoping.
My Solution:
What I ended up doing is creating a new build configuration and then defining a precompiler constant, which I used in code to determine whether to use the reference, or to fall back to the alternative (guaranteed to work) approach. It's not fully automatic, but it's relatively simple and seems quite elegant - good enough for my purposes.
Alternative:
If you wanted to fully automate this, it could be done using a pre-build command that runs a Batch script/small program to check the availabilty of a given reference on the machine and then updates a file containing precompiler constants. This however I considered more effort than it was worth, though it may have been more useful if I had multiple independent references that I need to resolve (check availability).