Book Image

Refactoring with C#

By : Matt Eland
5 (1)
Book Image

Refactoring with C#

5 (1)
By: Matt Eland

Overview of this book

Software projects start as brand-new greenfield projects, but invariably become muddied in technical debt far sooner than you’d expect. In Refactoring with C#, you'll explore what technical debt is and how it arises before walking through the process of safely refactoring C# code using modern tooling in Visual Studio and more recent C# language features using C# 12 and .NET 8. This book will guide you through the process of refactoring safely through advanced unit testing with XUnit and libraries like Moq, Snapper, and Scientist .NET. You'll explore maintainable code through SOLID principles and defensive coding techniques made possible in newer versions of C#. You'll also find out how to run code analysis and write custom Roslyn analyzers to detect and resolve issues unique to your code. The nature of coding is changing, and you'll explore how to use AI with the GitHub Copilot Chat to refactor, test, document, and generate code before ending with a discussion about communicating technical debt to leadership and getting organizational buy-in to refactor your code in enterprise organizations and in agile teams. By the end of this book, you'll understand the nature of refactoring and see how you can safely, effectively, and repeatably pay down the technical debt in your application while adding value to your business.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1: Refactoring with C# in Visual Studio
7
Part 2: Refactoring Safely
13
Part 3: Advanced Refactoring with AI and Code Analysis
18
Part 4: Refactoring in the Enterprise

Identifying anti-patterns in C# code

I’ve often found myself telling new programmers that to build good software, you have to first build a lot of really bad software and learn from it.

While this statement is somewhat in jest, there is some truth to it: almost every developer can recognize code that’s written the wrong way and discover things that make it difficult to work with, and doing so helps you write better code the next time.

When your code is bad, there’s usually a part of you that knows it. You see little things that you don’t love: duplicated pieces of code, inconsistencies in naming or parameter ordering, passing too many parameters around, methods, or even classes that are just too big to manage effectively.

These symptoms are what we commonly refer to as code smells, and we’ll revisit them later in this section.

Beyond code smells are something called anti-patterns, which is code that significantly deviates from community...