Visual Studio - is there a way to generate a warning if a return value is not checked?

Question

We have an in-house API written in C# where many of the methods have return values, typically bool's or ints, which sometimes the callers ignore. The return values are there for a reason, e.g., to indicate a problem or result of some kind, so we want to encourage the callers to actually check the result rather than just blithely assuming the method worked as expected, only to have things go bad farther downstream.

Is there a way to use the Visual Studio compiler to enforce checking return values by flagging calls, using a warning or error, when a caller fails to check the return value of a non-void method?

Answer 1

If you want to encourage better practices, use exceptions. That'll at least make them aware something is happening if they simply neglected to do anything. If they bury the exception, they bury it. But it requires an active decision to do so.

Basically any time your code can go "I'm at a point where there's a problem and the solution is either absent or ambiguous" is when to throw.

Besides throwing exceptions, when you return control back to the caller, there's nothing programmatically you can do to enforce what they do afterwards.

Answer 2

There already is an compiler-warning for this, [MSDN][1]

[1]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182273.aspx is you use FX cop