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

Controlling program flow

One of the most basic things new developers learn is how programs execute lines of code in sequence and how if statements and other language features control what statements execute next.

In this section, we’ll focus on the BoardingProcessor class's CanPassengerBoard method. The method starts simple enough:

public string CanPassengerBoard(Passenger passenger) {
  bool isMilitary = passenger.IsMilitary;
  bool needsHelp = passenger.NeedsHelp;
  int group = passenger.BoardingGroup;

Here, CanPassengerBoard takes in a Passenger object and returns a string. The method also declares a few local variables holding pieces of data from the object passed in.

These variables aren’t necessary and could be removed by performing an inline variable refactoring, which we’ll talk about later in this chapter. However, as they improve the readability of the code that follows, their existence is largely helpful...