Dajbych.net

Short an­swer is that method is miss­ing be­cause some­one in the de­vel­op­ment team for­got to use an Ob­so­lete at­tribute. This method in the Teleme­tryClient class in the Mi­crosoft.Ap­pli­ca­tion­In­sights NuGet pack­age is used very of­ten. Af­ter the lat­est up­date of the pack­age it just dis­ap­peared. Sur­pris­ingly, the method isn’t listed the In­tel­liSence but the older code where this method is used can be suc­cess­fully com­piled without any error or warn­ing.

The case

The chrono­log­i­cal or­der of events which forced me to write this ar­ti­cle was fol­low­ing:

May 23, Microsoft.ApplicationInisghts, 2.6.4

The Teleme­tryClient.Track­Met­ric method does not con­tain any sum­mary or at­tribute which would af­fect IDE.

August 7, Microsoft.ApplicationInisghts, 2.7.1

The Teleme­tryClient.Track­Met­ric method gets the sum­mary Doc­u­mentation Com­ment. There is noth­ing bad, but the in­for­ma­tion it con­tains does not have the right se­man­tic. The sum­mary tag is used to de­scribe a type or a type mem­ber. It isn’t in­tended to mark the stage of its life­cy­cle.

August 11, Microsoft.ApplicationInisghts, 2.7.2

Four days af­ter, the Teleme­tryClient.Track­Met­ric method is hid­den from the In­tel­liSence. There is noth­ing bad, but this step makes im­pos­si­ble to see the con­tent of the sum­mary tag above.

My recommendation

• Tell users of your li­brary about method dep­re­cation by at­tribut­ing it with the Ob­so­lete at­tribute and let them sev­eral months for adapt­ing their code to your changes.
• Use the sum­mary tag for de­scrib­ing func­tion­al­ity, not for an­nounc­ing life­cy­cle progress.
• Use TFVC’s Code Review. If you must use Git adopt a code re­view pro­cess.
• In gen­eral, hid­ing a method from the In­tel­liSence isn’t a good idea be­cause the over­head for back­ward com­pat­i­bil­ity is hid­den. It makes sense in rare cases only, for ex­am­ple in case of mak­ing a new frame­work com­pat­i­ble with the le­gacy code writ­ten for the frame­work pre­de­ces­sor.