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

Improving classes with interfaces and polymorphism

We’re nearly at the close of this chapter on object-oriented refactoring. However, before we close the chapter, let’s discuss a few places where introducing interfaces and polymorphism can help further improve our code.

Extracting interfaces

At the moment, our CharterFlightInfo class stores a list of CargoItems representing its cargo:

public class CharterFlightInfo : FlightInfoBase {
  public List<CargoItem> Cargo { get; } = new();
  // Other members omitted...
}

Each cargo item the charter flight includes must be a CargoItem or something that inherits from it. For example, if we were to create the HazardousCargoItem we discussed in the last section and try to store it in the cargo collection, it must inherit from CargoItem to compile.

In many systems, you don’t want to force people to inherit from your classes if they want to customize the system’s behavior. In these...