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

Adopting a testing mindset

Let’s take a step back and talk about why a book on refactoring features an entire series of chapters around testing. The reason is that code that needs to be refactored is often a bit more volatile and tends to break more easily when changed. Since the art of refactoring is about changing the form of the software without changing its behavior, introducing bugs when refactoring is undesirable and unacceptable.

This is where tests come in. Tests give you the confidence you and your team need to be able to improve your code. Your legacy code may or may not have tests around it already, so the responsibility and necessity of ensuring good tests are present falls to you before you perform any testing work.

This requires you to adopt a testing mindset. This phrase refers to thinking about tests at the beginning of the development process as a vital component of software development and refactoring, not as an afterthought.

While we’ll explore...