I came across an issue today that I think perfectly exhibits the principal of forward thinking in coding. Consider the following block of code:
IList<MyObject> myList = myAdapter.Read();
if (myList.Count != 0)
{
... do some work ...
}
The if statement is only executing its contents if the count of objects in the list is not zero. This seems pretty harmless on the surface. We're taking an IList<T> after all and we know that List<T>.Count returns zero if the list is empty. Therein lies the trap. We're not necessarily talking about List<T> here, we're talking about any class that implements the IList<T> interface. You can see the facepalm coming a mile away.
What if a class implements IList<T> and decides to return -1 for .Count to represent an empty collection. This is actually more common than you'd think as there seem to be a large number of people out there who still use -1 as a return code for anything that is empty or not initialized. The solution here would be to instead check for:
if (myList.Count > 0)
Instead of checking for Count != 0, we instead check if Count is greater than zero. It doesn't matter now whether the IList<T> implementation returns 0, -1, or -999 for Count to indicate an empty collection, the assertion that the if block should only run on a non-empty list still stands.