Visual C#: Easy Code Refactoring

Article
1/17/2024

Introduction

Code refactoring is very important, a necessity especially if you use agile methodologies. Even if you are following other classic software development methods, you do need to refactor your code in order to promote re-usability, improve readability & performance etc.

You can easily use the tools available in Visual C# to easily refactor your code.

Let's start with this very simple console application. We will try to use Visual C# tooling/code refactoring features to help improve this code in below sections.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
 
namespace CodeRefactoringDemo
{
    class Program
    {
        static void  Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Enter first number: ");
            int firstNumber = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine());
 
            Console.WriteLine("Enter second number: ");
            int secondNumber = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine());
 
            Console.WriteLine("Sum is: " + (firstNumber + secondNumber));
            Console.WriteLine("Average is: " + (firstNumber + secondNumber) / 2);
 
            Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit: ");
            Console.ReadKey();
        }
    }
}

Remove & Sort Usings

We can clearly notice a lot of usings that we may never use in this program. We can easily fix this using Remove & Sort using feature, like so:

This results in only one using being left out (that we are actually using in this program):

using System;

Extract Method

The next "issue" with this program is that we are carrying out our work without using helper methods. This will result in highly un-maintainable + un-reusable code! Let's use the Extract Method feature to refactor existing code, create & use these helper methods. Let's select all code that we use to get input from the user & extract this to a single method, which we could call again (if required) to re-get user's input:

You will need to give an appropriate name to this new helper method:

The resulting code now becomes (with all above refactoring applied):

using System;
 
namespace CodeRefactoringDemo
{
    class Program
    {
        static void  Main(string[] args)
        {
            int firstNumber;
            int secondNumber;
            GetInput(out firstNumber, out secondNumber);
 
            Console.WriteLine("Sum is: " + (firstNumber + secondNumber));
            Console.WriteLine("Average is: " + (firstNumber + secondNumber) / 2);
 
            Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit: ");
            Console.ReadKey();
        }
 
        private static  void GetInput(out int  firstNumber, out  int secondNumber)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Enter first number: ");
            firstNumber = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine());
 
            Console.WriteLine("Enter second number: ");
            secondNumber = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine());
        }
    }
}

Let's do the same to those operations happening inside the Console.WriteLine call. This will help us in invoking the same operation again (if required) & so promotes code reuse (showing extracting the Sum method, the same process applies to Average as well):

Also, lets put all the code related to displaying the results in another method, the resulting code would now look like:

using System;
 
namespace CodeRefactoringDemo
{
    class Program
    {
        static void  Main(string[] args)
        {
            int firstNumber;
            int secondNumber;
 
            GetInput(out firstNumber, out secondNumber);
            DisplayResults(firstNumber, secondNumber);
 
            Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit: ");
            Console.ReadKey();
        }
 
        private static  void DisplayResults(int firstNumber, int secondNumber)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Sum is: " + Sum(firstNumber, secondNumber));
            Console.WriteLine("Average is: " + Average(firstNumber, secondNumber));
        }
 
        private static  int Average(int firstNumber, int secondNumber)
        {
            return (firstNumber + secondNumber) / 2;
        }
 
        private static  int Sum(int firstNumber, int secondNumber)
        {
            return (firstNumber + secondNumber);
        }
 
        private static  void GetInput(out int  firstNumber, out  int secondNumber)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Enter first number: ");
            firstNumber = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine());
 
            Console.WriteLine("Enter second number: ");
            secondNumber = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine());
        }
    }
}

Regions

Let's use the regions feature to further organize the code. You can easily group all private methods that we extracted above & put them into a region called Private Methods (say):

The resulting program (after collapsing the region) would look like (improves readability):

Surround With

We have already used this feature above (regions). Now lets use this same tooling to add a global exception handler to our code:

This would result in:

Rename

You can easily rename methods, variable, etc using this feature. This also takes care of renaming all code that is dependent, for e.g. if you rename a method call, it will also rename the actual method definition and this is the real deal right?

Let's rename GetInput to GetUserInput like so:

Enter the new name for this method:

You can now see a preview of this change & what all dependent code would be renamed as well:

Conclusion

By leveraging Visual Studio / C# tooling or features, we can easily refactor our code to help improve code quality, readability, performance, & reuse among many other improvements.

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Code Sample

Download complete code from here. (link is dead)

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Dutch: Gemakkelijk Code Refactoring met behulp van Visual C#

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