Avoid defining methods with default arguments!
Today I have been exploring the “Member design” chapter of a great book of Cwalina/Abrams "Framework Design Guidelines", and found a guideline which shocked me a bit. No, the guideline itself is correct and valuable. I just was never thinking it works like this.
VB.NET has a language feature called default arguments. When you define a method in your class, you can specify default values to the optional parameters to be taken when this parameter is omitted. As far as I understand, this is a kind of alternative to the method overloading.
Consider the following code:
Public Class DefaultValues
Public Function Sum(ByVal a As Integer, Optional ByVal b As Integer = 100)
Sum = a + b
End Function
End Class
(I speak C# myself, so excuse me my poor VB ;-))
Let’s say we compile this code into a DLL and we have a client console application to utilize that library:
Module TestDefaultValues
Sub Main()
Dim df As DefaultValues.DefaultValues = New DefaultValues.DefaultValues()
Console.WriteLine(df.Sum(55))
End Sub
End Module
Compile everything and run TestDefaultValues.exe. The result is predictable: 155.
Now change the default value from 100 to 200 and compile only the library. DO NOT recompile the client application. Run it again, and it is still 155!
This is why it is strongly not recommended to use default arguments instead of normal method overloading. And this issue is why C# doesn’t expose this technique.
Be careful, VB.NET developers! And long live C#! :-)