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

Calculating code metrics in Visual Studio

Every codebase I’ve ever worked with has had a few maintainability hot spots. These are areas that are frequently changed, have a higher degree of complexity than other areas of code, and represent serious quality risks to the software project.

These areas are usually some of the most critical to refactor and they tend to be easily discoverable using code metrics.

Code metrics calculate a handful of useful statistics about every file, class, method, and property in your C# code. This lets you spot hot spots in your code that have significantly higher complexity or lower maintainability. Code metrics can even help you find classes that are too large and likely violate the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) as we discussed in Chapter 8.

To calculate code metrics, open your solution in Visual Studio and then click the Analyze menu, followed by Calculate Code Metrics, and then For Solution, as shown in Figure 12.1:

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