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

Moving beyond classes

In C# 9 and beyond, Microsoft has made concerted efforts to give developers new options for working with classes through things such as record types, init-only properties, primary constructors, and more.

In this section, we’ll explore how these newer C# constructs can improve the design of your classes.

Preferring immutable classes

In recent years, immutable classes have become more and more popular. This immutability refers to the inability to change an object after it has been created.

What this means is that once an object exists, you cannot modify its state and instead are limited to creating new objects that are like the original. If you’re familiar with working with string and DateTime objects in .NET, you’ve seen this concept with methods such as ToLower on string and AddDays on DateTime returning a new object instead of modifying the original object.

Let’s look at a small class representing a boarding pass that...