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

Unit Testing

In the first part of this book, we covered the process of refactoring and some of the more common refactoring techniques. Now, it’s time for us to take a step back and remind ourselves of what refactoring is: refactoring is the process of changing the form or shape of the code without changing how it behaves.

In other words, we can make our code as clean and easy to maintain as we can, but if those changes introduce bugs, that’s not refactoring since refactoring is about changing the form of code without changing its behavior. To improve our code without introducing bugs, we need a safety net: unit testing.

In this chapter, we’ll explore unit tests and cover the following main topics:

  • Understanding testing and unit tests
  • Testing code with xUnit
  • Refactoring unit tests
  • Exploring other testing frameworks
  • Adopting a testing mindset