.Hibri

Sometimes (most of the time) when looking at a piece of un-clean code, it’s not clear what path to take to make the code that little bit more better. The easiest first refactoring to do is extract method.  Use extract method ruthlessly. Attempt to get and get many smallest methods. Repeat till these methods become smaller and smaller as close as possible to one line of code in a method.

Patterns emerge when creating more and more methods. The methods start to show groupings and responsibilities. When the methods obey the Law of Demeter, they can be moved around to other classes and also create new classes. It becomes easier to see duplication.

Methods are the smallest building blocks of a piece of software. These small and granular building blocks are more flexible. They give more ways to build things and allow greater reuse. When these building blocks are available, the code becomes much clearer. The big refactorings are made possible.

I like the idea of running unit tests continuously as I type and save code.  I read

about Autobuild .Net recently. This is easy to setup and use.

Grab the  code from http://code.google.com/p/autobuildtool/  build it by running the default.build script.

When this is built successfully, the build process creates the tool in the output directory.

Copy the contents of this output directory to the project where you want autobuild to work on.

Autobuild .Net runs a nant build script each time a file is saved in a specific path being watched.

Change the autobuild.build script with the path to the solution file and the path to the unit test assembly.

Next in autobuild.cmd , change the first argument to the directory to watch for changes. The second argument is for the path to autobuild.build. This is the nant build script that autobuild will execute. You can replace this with an existing Nant build script.

Run atuobuild.cmd . That's it. Type some code, save it and watch the window go red because it didn’t compile. Make it compile and watch it go green.

Write a failing test and see it go red, make it pass and see it go green. Fun eh ? :)