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Asked: 2026-05-10T20:12:49+00:00

My present contract engagement is at a large E-Commerce company. Their code base which

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My present contract engagement is at a large E-Commerce company. Their code base which has origins going back to .Net 1.0 has caught me by surprise to contain many issues that raise the level of smell beyond the last crap I took.

That notwithstanding and trying to diffuse my level of distraction from it, I go along merrily trying to add in features to either fix other problems or extend more crap. Where I touch the DAL/BLL the time it will take to fix the aforementioned will be done. However I wanted to get a vote of confidence from the experts to get some assurance of not wasting the clients time or worse having my credibility voted down by touching ‘stuff that works’. Of course unit testing would solve or at least soften this worry. Perhaps this should also be added to the wtf.com?

Public Function GetSizeInfoBySite(ByVal siteID As String) As IList     Dim strSQL As String = 'YES INLINE SQL!! :)'     Dim ci As CrapInfo     Dim alAnArrayList As ArrayList      Dim cn As New SqlConnection(ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings('ConnectionString'))     Dim cmd As New SqlCommand(strSQL, cn)     cmd.Parameters.Add(New SqlParameter('@MySiteID', SqlDbType.NVarChar, 2)).Value = siteID     cn.Open()     Dim rs As SqlDataReader = cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection)     While rs.Read()         ci = New CategoryInfo(rs('someID'), rs('someName'))         If IsNothing(alAnArrayList) Then             alAnArrayList = New ArrayList         End If         alAnArrayList.Add(ci)     End While     rs.Close()     Return CType(alAnArrayList, IList) End Function

Does anyone see problems with this aside from the inline SQL which makes my gut churn? At the least wouldn’t you ordinarily wrap the above in a try/catch/finally which most of us knows has been around since .Net v1.0? Even better would’nt it be wise to fix with Using statements? Does the SQLDataReader close really encapsulate the connection close automagically?

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  1. Nothing wrong with inline sql if the user input is properly parameterized, and this looks like it is.

    Other than that, yes you do need to close the connections. On a busy web site you could hit your limit and that would cause all kinds of weirdness.

    I also noticed it’s still using an arraylist. Since they’ve moved on from .Net 1.0 it’s time to update those to generic List<T>‘s (and avoid the call to CType- you should be able to DirectCast() that instead).

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