For those of you interested, and in St. Louis, I’ll be speaking at the .Net Users Group meeting this month. My topic will be “Refactoring: Adding Design to your Code After It Is Written”. My underlying intent in this talk is to convince people that refactoring is a worthwhile activity, as it adds value to your code.

I intend to walk through some simple refactorings to improve a piece of procedural code and begin to flesh out its dumb data objects into living, breathing OO classes.

Outline:

1. Introduction of me (boring!)
2. Imagine yourself walking into work and being asked to make a change to some code you’ve never seen before…
3. Maybe if we improve it a bit, we can read it better…
4. Good, now I can read it, maybe I can start thinking about changing it
5. This is refactoring!
6. New buzzword, not reworking. Can stop in middle
7. Let’s improve the code a bit more and see where that goes…
8. Why can I do this? (tests, better code, etc)
9. These are my tools (brain, patterns, refactoring book)
10. Here are the reasons why I can’t do this…
11. What else can we improve in the code
12. Other resources
13. GIVEAWAY!!!

We have 3 signed copies of Jim Newkirk’s Test Driven Development in Microsoft .Net and may have a copy or two of the Resharper refactoring tool to give away.

Hope to see lots of you there.

— bab