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

Pinning tests with Snapper

Let’s say you’ve inherited some complex legacy code that returns an object with a lot of properties. Some of these properties may, in turn, contain other complex objects with their own nest of properties. You’re just starting to work with this code and need to make a change, but there aren’t any tests in place and you’re not even sure what properties are important to verify.

I’ve seen this scenario a few times now and can attest that a special testing library called Snapper is a fantastic solution to this problem.

What Snapper does is it creates a snapshot of an object and stores it to disk in a JSON file. When Snapper next runs, it generates another snapshot and then compares it to the snapshot it stored previously. If the snapshots differ at all, Snapper will fail the test and alert you to that problem.

Snapper and Jest

For those of you with a JavaScript background, Snapper was inspired by the snapshot...