CodeSOD: A Null Mystery

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The Daily WTF

The saying goes that debugging is like solving a murder mystery, where you are both the victim and the killer. This, of course, is a bit inaccurate, since we rarely are the only programmer working on a project.

Cole Tobin brings us a small mystery in C# today, though in this case, the mystery is- how does this even work?

string localDir = “null”; string filePath; if (save_to_Temp) { dir = Path.GetDirectoryName(engineeringDataPushPath); } else { #if PRODUCTION dir = @”S:DocumentscalibrationCalibration Certs” + modelNumber + “”; #else dir = @”calibration cert” + “”; #endif } if (localDir != null) dir = localDir;

The middle of this code is a bit of static about trying to guess where a file should get stored, with bonuses for a hard-coded reference to a mapped network drive when running in production, which I’m sure will never cause problems. Even better, they take advantage of

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