eXtreme.NET Iteration One: Refactoring with Resharper : Page 2

Exploring Resharper
Deepak and Pete take one look at Pete's desk and decide to work at Deepak' s desk instead. They load up the CourseCosts library.

Here's a version of the library that includes all of the code examined in this article.

You can download a trial version of Resharper from JetBrains at http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/.

Deepak: I've already installed Resharper on this machine.

Pete: I guessed that is why you have the extra Resharper menu on your Visual Studio menu bar.

Deepak: Sue is right, You can be a smart ass sometimes!

Pete grins but remains silent.

Deepak: So let's see what this project consists of.

Pete: The files we'd be interested in are probably the CourseCost and CostItems classes.

Deepak: Oh! You do know something about this project, don't you?

Pete: Like I said, kind of…

Deepak: Hey, there is even a test class in here with a whole test in it!

Pete: Yes it uses that text.xml file, I remember this. We have to copy that file to the root of our C: drive to get the test to work.

Deepak: And what exactly is the reason for that?

Pete: The CourseCost class works out the cost of a course for each attendee using the figures in the XML file. Open it up and I'll explain it to you.

Deepak opens the text.xml file shown below.

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"  ?> 
   <Courses>
      <London>
         <Venue>3000</Venue>
         <Catering>30</Catering>
         <Equipment>2500</Equipment>
         <Speaker>2000</Speaker>
         <MaxAttendees>30</MaxAttendees>
      </London>
   </Courses>

Pete: So the idea is there will be an entry for each location the company runs courses. Here we have only created one for the test: London. Then the cost items are listed as children of that entry. The MaxAttendees and Catering are kind of special cases.

Deepak: How so?

Pete: Well, the other costs are fixed costs for the course, The Catering is a cost per attendee. The MaxAttendees is not a cost at all, but the maximum number of attendees that venue can cater for.

Deepak: OK, makes sense so far. Let's look at the code.

Deepak opens the CourseCost.cs file as shown in Listing 1.

Deepak: Yes, this is what I was talking about! This is a real mess.

Pete: PANIC!

Eddie: Is everything OK with you guys?

Deepak: Yeah we're just looking at the messy code and…

Pete: PANIC!

Deepak: I'm sure we can fix it!

Pete: (Sounding a bit doubtful.) OK, show me what we can do.

Deepak: OK, let's start with those public member variables. Do they really need to be public?

Pete: What, the costItems and the attendees?

Deepak: Yes, Resharper can show us where they are being used.

Pete: That's cool! How do we do that?

Deepak: Move the mouse over the costItems variable name and right-click. Do you see the "Find Usages" item in the popup menu?

Pete: Yep.

Deepak: Click on it.

Pete does this and a dialog appears showing the places the variable is used (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Find Usages Dialog: The figure shows the results of using the Find Usages dialog to find all occurrences of a variable.

Deepak: As I thought, it is not used outside of this class. Let's change it to a private variable. Check the attendees as well.

Pete: The same, I'll change both of them.

Deepak: Great, now let's look at that nasty big function GetCost.

Pete: OK, what's wrong with it?

Deepak: I think it smells. It seems too large and is doing too much. We should take some of the functionality out into smaller methods.

Pete: OK, but don't we pay the cost of method invocation? Isn't that going to slow the code down?

Deepak: Is speed an issue for this component?

Pete: I don't know. It might be.

Deepak: I think until we know it is an issue, I'd rather not worry about it.

Pete: OK, What shall we do about this big method then?

Deepak: We can start by extracting the code that calculates the total cost into its own method. Select the foreach loop that goes through the costItems, and right-click. Do you see the Refactor menu item at the bottom of the popup menu?

Figure 2. Extract Method: The figure shows the Extract Method dialog.

Pete: Yes.

Deepak: Select that and then select Extract Method.

Pete does this and the Extract Method dialog box appears as shown in Figure 2.

Pete: OK, now what?

Deepak: How about changing the return value so it returns the totalcost and we'll call the method…

Pete: TotalCost?

Deepak: Yes, that should do it. You can see the signature preview at the bottom of the dialog. I like that! Click OK.

The dialog before Pete clicks OK is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Extract Method Dialog: The figure shows the Extract dialog used to extract the TotalCost method.

Pete: Hey cool! It took the code out of the big function and made the call to it and everything!

Deepak: It's nice huh?

Pete: Sure is, what's next?

Deepak: Let's do the same with the other foreach loop that extracts the cost items from the XML nodes.

Pete: OK, what shall we call this function?

Deepak: How about ExtractCostItems?

Pete: Great, look at that! A few clicks of the mouse and the code is starting to look like proper object-oriented code!

Pete grins, guessing this is just the tip of the iceberg. The code that Pete and Deepak are now looking at is shown in Listing 2.

Eddie: How are you guys doing?

Pete: Really good. It's so easy to change the code using this Resharper tool.

Eddie: That's good to hear but are you thinking about why you are changing the code? What is the task at hand?

Deepak: Oh!

Pete: Um... we have just been playing with what's there. I haven't really been thinking about the task. Um… what is the task?

Deepak: Something to do with handling a sponsor paying for some of the costs.

Eddie: Chris, can you help these guys understand what the CourseCosts library does?

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