Darren McLeod

I love refactoring code. To refactor code safely you need automated tests. Some code, especially code not written using Test Driven Development(TDD), make it difficult to write tests for the part of the code you are looking to change. Usually what you face are a class that has many dependencies, so in your test setup, you have to create all these dependencies to inject into the constructor even though many or perhaps all of these dependencies don't even have anything to do with the part of the code you are looking to change. Or the method that you want to write a change for is private and the calling public method has a bunch of dependencies which again many will not have anything to do with the part of the code you are looking to change. You are thinking: "If only this code was in a public method it would be so much easier to test". But you may have heard somewhere that changing the code just to make it easier to test is bad.  This is a terrible line of thought that has ...

One of the first things I do with a new install of Visual Studio(VS) is I head over to DevExpress and download/install CodeRush Xpress . CodeRush Xpress is a free refactoring tool from DevExpress for VS 2010 or older(They stopped offering the free version for VS 2012 or newer so now it looks like the first thing I'll be doing with a new install of Visual Studio is beg my boss for a CodeRush license). If you are not familiar with refactoring and you are interested in being a better coder you should read Martin Fowler's book: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series). In it the authors Martin Fowler , Kent Beck , John Brant , William Opdyke and Don Roberts give very practical advice on improving the design of code. Along with improving the design of code, refactoring can improve the readability of code.  My favorite refactoring pattern for this is Extract Method(EM) . When you come across a really long method or find th...