Warnings as Errors

Warning:
A: To give notice to beforehand especially of danger or evil
B: To give admonishing advice
C: To call to one’s attention

With that said, we could infer that a warning is something that says “Hey, this is kind of important, you might want to watch this.” To me, in .NET Development, a warning means I’ve done something wrong, I’ve created an error.

To ensure my builds are top notch, I have updated my projects to treat Warnings as Errors. This allows me to be notified of something immediately. If a warning occurs, its foresight into the future. Warning: “This is what could happen.” Pretty much that means, you should probably fix that right now. Therefore I dont let builds complete if there are warnings in certain projects.

Here’s how to do it…

1. Go to the project properties and select the Build Tab.
2. Select “All” under Treat Warnings as Errors

3. Save and build.

Now, lets say you have a variable thats created but not used in a method somewhere, you’d get an error screen like this:

The build will fail locally as well as on your build server.

This will help alleviate errors in the future that may be caused by something that was a warning two months ago. 🙂

You can also accomplish through the command line compiler:

csc.exe /warnaserror

This compiler switch will treat warnings as errors.

*Note: You might want to leave this option in its default state for projects where a warning is ommitted automatically, like set up projects that publish to a local system. This is something that I’m ok with as we publish it locally anyway.