CodeSOD: A Little Info

Matt has plans for the next few years: dealing with the "inheritance" of some legacy systems.

They're written in VB.Net, which isn't itself a problem, but the code quality leaves just a bit to be desired.

Dim FileInfo As New System.IO.FileInfo(FileName)FileName = FileInfo.NameIf FileName = "" Then Throw New ApplicationException("cannot determine the file name for '" & FileName & "'")End If

I suspect they wanted to check if the file exists. Which is definitely a reasonable thing to want to check with aFileInfo object, which is why it has an Exists property which one could use. But this code doesn't accomplish the exists check- if the file doesn't exist, the Name property is whatever name you used to construct the object. Perhaps they hoped to canonicalize the name, but that's also not a thing the Name property does.

So, in practice, this code doesn't do anything, but boy, it looks like it might be an important check.

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