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Why you should care

Certain built-in commands in VB/VB.net bring about unnecessary reliability risk to applications. This unexpected application or machine behavior occurs a result of awkward/unreliable methods of handling errors and interacting with memory - that includes using pointers, forcing garbage collection, unstructured exception handling etc.

Business Impacts

The use of certain (unrecommended) built-in commands can increase the likelihood for applications to malfunction and fail in a production environment. Debugging and working with these commands can increase development time significantly.[nz_btn text="Production Risk" target="_self" animate="false" animation_type="ghost" color="pink" size="small" shape="rounded" type="normal" hover_normal="opacity" hover_ghost="fill" link="http://casthighlight.wpengine.com/category/product/indicators-methodology/innovation/" icon="icon-office"][nz_btn text="Complexity" target="_self" animate="false" animation_type="ghost" color="mulled_wine" size="small" shape="rounded" type="ghost" hover_normal="opacity" hover_ghost="fill" link="http://casthighlight.wpengine.com/category/product/indicators-methodology/innovation/" icon="icon-block"]

CAST recommendations

Identifying the built-in functions that can potentially cause reliability issues from the patterns above and encourage developers to seek alternatives to these risky commands. Documentation of most of these identified issues can be easily found online and in the references below.

References

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/118633/whats-so-wrong-about-using-gc-collect http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?759361-RESOLVED-Need-Full-Understanding-of-VarPtr-StrPtr-ObjPtr https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/language-reference/statements/resume-statement https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29418248/what-does-the-vb-net-ubound-function-actually-do-and-why-does-the-msdn-document[nz_btn text="Style Guide" link="https://github.com/Kristories/awesome-guidelines" target="_self" icon="icon-book" animate="false" animation_type="ghost" color="turquoise" size="small" shape="rounded" type="ghost" hover_normal="fill" hover_ghost="fill"]

How we detect

This code insight follows code which contains “system” and “gc“, count one violation each time “collect (” is encountered. Count one violation each time following patterns are encountered :

• objptr
• strptr
• varptr
• ismissing
• as new
• resume
• for … lbound
• to … ubound

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