Compiler Warnings Increase - What does it all mean?

DanEssin posted on Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Hi all,
I'm a person that tends to be very concrete. I get unsettled and confused by ambiguity. I'm also, relatively, a novice programmer, having only been doing it for 42 years. I have observed the following:

In 3.6.2 the cslacs project generates 57 compiler warnings - many of them similar to "Warning    44    Argument type 'ushort' is not CLS-compliant    C:\CSLA_362\cslacs\Csla\C5\Builtin.cs    244    38    Csla"

In 3.6.3, 72 warnings are generated.
In 3.7, 74 warnings are generated.

So my question is: Does any of this matter?
Are these warnings simply a result of no one having had the time to fix them?
Or are they structurally important and should not be touched?

Is it safe to simply ignore these warnings and wait to see if they ever go away?

Some guidance or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Dan Essin

RockfordLhotka replied on Tuesday, September 01, 2009

In 3.6 most of the warnings are from the C5 library, which isn't mine, I'm just using it. I've opted to not address them, because that would mean altering someone else's codebase - now and in the future if I upgrade C5.

In CSLA .NET for Silverlight there are quite a lot of warnings (a few hundred) because I'm slowly adding comments as I work through parts of the code. That code is the result of a team working for several months, and we intentionally chose to not do code comments with the plan that I'd do them as I reviewed the code.

Well, the reality is that so much code was written so fast (and I have like a real job too), that I couldn't comment fast enough... :(

Version 3.7 includes some components from CSLA .NET for Silverlight, so the new warnings could be missing comments. Or something else. 3.7 was created very rapidly with the pure and simple intent of making sure there was a version that builds for Silverlight 3.