Visual Studio Refactoring Tips

5 Visual Studio Refactoring Tips 💡

Either for the sake of optimization or better code readability, we often refactor the code. Code refactoring includes many actions, such as deleting unnecessary code, encapsulating certain functionalities, changing the names of variables, and functions for better understanding, and so on.

If we use 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐨 as an 𝐈𝐃𝐄, it can help us a lot to quickly and successfully refactor the code.

Visual Studio makes things easy for us and has support for a lot of code changes. Today I am presenting 5 shortcuts in Visual Studio that I use all the time.

• 𝐑𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐞𝐫

When we want to change the name of a variable in a file/function, it often happens that the variable is used in several places.
Use 𝐂𝐭𝐫𝐥+𝐑, 𝐑 so that when you change the name of a variable in one place, all references are automatically changed.

• 𝐄𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐝

We often want to increase code readability by extracting a specific piece of code in one method into another method.
The hotkey 𝐂𝐭𝐫𝐥+. triggers the 𝐐𝐮𝐢𝐜𝐤 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 menu. From this menu, we can choose 𝐄𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐝 or 𝐄𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐋𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐅𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐄𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐋𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐅𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧.

• 𝐑𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐔𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬

When we see a "grey" using statement at the beginning of the file, it means that the namespace is not used anywhere in the file - it is natural to delete it.
Using the 𝐑𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐔𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐔𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐂𝐓𝐑𝐋 +. 𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐮, we delete all "using" statements that are not used.

• 𝐄𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐞

If we have a class, and we want to extract the Interface from that class (e.g., due to Dependency Injection), we can do that with the help of the shortcut 𝐂𝐓𝐑𝐋 + 𝐑, 𝐈.
We can also select all the methods that interest us from the opened window.

• 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡 𝐭𝐨 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐐

From CTRL+. the menu above the foreach loop, we will generally get a suggestion to 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐐 to increase the readability of the code.
*Notice that typically loops are faster than LINQ queries because the compiler can optimize loops while LINQ queries extensively rely on method calls.