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

Understanding code standards

In this chapter, we’re going to explore the idea of code standards.

Code standards are an agreed-upon set of standards your team decides should be applied to any new code created by the team.

These standards have an important role in resolving disputes, focusing attention on the areas that truly matter, reducing the amount of technical debt teams naturally accumulate, and helping pay down existing technical debt.

The importance of code standards

One of the most frustrating experiences I’ve ever had as a developer is when I’ve sent a carefully thought-out change to another developer for review and I’ve heard back remarks such as the following:

  • I don’t like your curly brace formatting
  • Your indentation doesn’t match mine. I use spaces instead of tabs
  • I’d like it if you’d use var instead of the Type

In these scenarios, the developer in question ignores the substance of...