One feature of refactoring that is available in .NET now is the ability to obsolete your properties or methods. Say you have a method (or other member) in your application that is no longer needed or whose signature needs to be changed. You could delete or change the method, and then find and modify all of the code that uses the method. But a better approach is to mark the method as obsolete, basically declaring it to be deprecated. By marking a method as obsolete, instead of deleting or changing it, you avoid needing to modify any of the code that uses the method.
Code that uses the obsolete method will get a warning or a syntax error (depending on how you obsolete the method) the next time that code is compiled. This allows you to define a logical obsolescence path for your code. For example, when building components for a team of developers, your standards may require that you obsolete a method for six months with a warning and another six months with a syntax error, before the method is actually removed from the code.
To mark a routine as obsolete, use the ObsoleteAttribute.
[ObsoleteAttribute(“This method is obsolete. Please use Retrieve(iID) instead”,
false)]
public DataSet Retrieve(string sProduct)
{
// Code here performs the retrieve
}
The first parameter of the ObsoleteAttribute is the message text that the developer will see wherever the obsolete method is used. This message text will appear in the Task List window in Visual Studio.
The second parameter of the ObsoleteAttribute is whether the obsolete member usage is considered to be an error. Set the parameter to False to specify that the developer using the method will get a warning message in the Task List window, or to True to generate a syntax error if the method is used.
