The Daily WTF

When John takes on a new codebase, he always looks for low-risk ways to learn the code by changing it. Things like beefing up the unit tests, tracking down warnings that have been left to languish, minor quality-of-life changes.

Well, a few years back, John inherited some C# code, and started tracking down some warnings. That lead to this method.

private void ClearAllFields() { bool bReturn = false; try { bReturn = true; } catch (ApplicationException) { throw; } catch { throw; } }

This doesn’t ClearAllFields. It doesn’t clear any fields. It doesn’t do anything. I especially love the bReturn variable in a void method. I love the bonus exception handlers for an operation that couldn’t throw an exception.

This kind of uselessness is scattered all over the codebase. Some of it may be vestigial- it used to do something, but gradually got whittled down to uselessness. Some

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