Do you work on a team that shares code libraries? Have you ever wanted to implement a new method to replace an old one (with a differing signature) and simply deleted the old method? You can handle these situations easier by using an attribute on a class or method. The attribute is called Obsolete. This allows you to gracefully mark code as deprecated as shown below:

C#

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\[Obsolete("This class has been deprecated.")\]
public class Test
{
    \[Obsolete("This method has been deprecated.")\]
    public void FooBar () { }
}

VB

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<Obsolete("This class has been deprecated.")>
Public Class Test
    <Obsolete("This method has been deprecated.")>
    Public Sub FooBar()
    End Sub 
End Class

However, in the code above, both of these instances will only show a warning in the compiler. To throw an exception, you can add another property to the code to pass in a Boolean value to throw an exception as shown below:

C#

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\[Obsolete("This class has been deprecated.", true)\]
public class Test
{
    \[Obsolete("This method has been deprecated.", true)\]
    public void FooBar () { }
}

VB

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<Obsolete("This class has been deprecated.", True)>
Public Class Test
    <Obsolete("This method has been deprecated.", True)>
    Public Sub FooBar()
    End Sub 
End Class