Question

I’m currently tasked with cleaning up, bug fixing and optimising a Form in winforms (3000 lines of code in one .cs file, it’s getting a bit ugly!). I’ve noticed a few obvious bad practices and some redundant calls already which I could sort out relatively easily.

However there’s one that is popping up a lot which seems to me like bad practice, but I can’t actually back it up with any documentation. I could be completely wrong.

private void datePicker_DateChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
  tabControl_SelectedIndexChanged(sender, e);
}

private void comboBox_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
  tabControl_SelectedIndexChanged(sender, e);
}

My first concern is that the method will have the sender object that is the date picker or the combo box, but does this matter? I asked myself, what is the sender object there for? Perhaps this is why it’s there? I also find EventArgs by itself is pretty useless as far (as I’m aware) unless the class is inherited.

I know that neither the sender or EventArgs are used in the tabControl_SelectedIndexChanged method, so the code works fine. What about possible future implications when some code is changed?

Should I change these to 3 different event handlers that all point to a simple void loadCurrentTab() method? Or perhaps I should get all 3 controls to call the same event handler, such as loadCurrentTab(sender, e)? Or just leave it as it is? Is it that important?

Answer 1

Should I change these to 3 different event handlers that all point to a simple void loadCurrentTab() method?

This would actually be my preference, in this scenario. This makes the intent very clear – all three event handlers are routing to one set of logic which (by design) doesn’t pay attention to the sender or EventArgs.