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Joel Bennett
Joel Bennett

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Tales from the Scrum Dungeon: Max Lines

The original Visual Basic (not Visual Basic .Net), at the time, had a maximum number of allowed lines of code in a single file.

Since you are reading this, you might be curious enough to know.

I once worked on a series of Windows apps. One of them contained a number of files that were basically SQL statements, but embedded in code. The particularly files in question were automatically generated, for better or worse. I'm not sure how the original app got written, and it's been long enough that I can't entirely remember what circumstances it was used, but when I started with it, I was warned. Apparently the generated code got large enough that it actually was too large to fit entirely in a single Visual Basic file.

Rather than rethink the entire tool chain, they did what they thought was best for the situation. They split it into two files.

There comes a point in time for every project where you need to take a step back and look at the big picture. Maybe there's a better way of performing the series of actions that you are trying to accomplish. Hopefully you take that step back before you hit the maximum number of lines of code in a single file.

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