Is there a way to get VS2008 to stop warning me about unreachable code?

Question

I have a few config options in my application along the lines of

const bool ExecuteThis=true;
const bool ExecuteThat=false;

and then code that

Answer 1

Well, #pragma, but that is a but grungy. I wonder if ConditionalAttribute would be better - i.e.

[Conditional("SOME_KEY")]
void DoThis() {...}
[Conditional("SOME_OTHER_KEY")]
void DoThis() {...}

Now calls to DoThis / DoThat are only included if SOME_KEY or SOME_OTHER_KEY are defined as symbols in the build ("conditional compilation symbols"). It also means you can switch between them by changing the configuration and defining different symbols in each.

Answer 2

Here's a trick:

    bool FALSE = false;
    if (FALSE) { ... 

This will prevent the warning. Wait. I know there's all this "You should not use that, why have code that is not executed?". Answer: Because during development you often need to set up test code. Eventually you will get rid of it. It's important that code it is there during development, but not executed all the time.

Sometimes you want to remove code execution temporarily, for debugging purposes.

Sometimes you want to truncate execution of a function temporarily. You can use this to avoid warnings:

...code.. { bool TRUE = true; if (TRUE) return; } ...more code...

These things avoid the warning. You might say, if temporary, one should keep the warning in. yes... but again... maybe you should not check it in that way, but temporarily it is useful to get the warning out, for example when spending all day debugging complex collision code.

So, you may ask, why does it matter? Well, these warnings get very annoying when I press F4 to go to the first error, and get some damn 10 warnings first instead and I am knee deep in debugging.

Use the #pragma, you say. Well, that would be a good idea, except that I can't find a way to do that globally on my entire project.. or in a way that will work with Unity3D, which is what I code in C# for. Oh, how useful #include would be.

Never mind, use #if ! Well... yes... but sometimes they are not what you want. They make the code messy and unreadable. You have to bracket your code with them just right. Putting if(false) in front of a block is just so much easier... no need to delimit the block, the braces do that.

What I do is make a nice globally accessible FALSE and TRUE and use them as I need do avoid errors.

And if I want to check if I am actually using them, I can search for all references, or more crudely, but just as effectively, remove them and thus be forced to look at every occurrence of this little trick.