Martin Fowler of Refactoring fame (and I follow his blog -- although he calls it a “bliki“ as a cross between a blog and a wiki) maintains a site devoted to Refactoring at www.Refactoring.com (clever name, huh?). The catalog section describes the refactoring “recipes“ he details in his book -- I highly recommend his book on the topic, as it builds a shared vocabulary for describing these formulas for improving our code. The catalog descriptions are terse but convey their points well . . . maybe WeProgram.Net could do a Refactoring-of-the-Week sort of segment on our site. Any volunteers?
| As an aside, one thing I'd like WeProgram.Net to do more of is provide site visitors with a reason to come back other than to check our event schedules. We've got the latest blog posts from our members via RSS, which is a nice window to these blogs, and our presentation materials are good, but we could do much more. |
In March, Steve Metsker (no blog that I know of) and Darrell Norton presented to WeProgram.Net on the topic of Refactoring. It was an excellent session and I highly recommend groups use hands-on exercises to complement presentations . . . our user group strives to “stick to the code” and avoid the high level generalizations that can water down topics. In a large group, the hands-on part might get disorganized but if there's any way to make it happen do it because there's no better way to learn something than to apply it!
<plug shameless=“false“>Since I'm on the topic of User Groups, WeProgram.Net is hosting Wintellect's co-founder John Robbins tonight at 6:30 at ESI in Newport News. His latest book, which I think we'll be giving away tonight, is very popular.</plug>
This a rambling sort of post. Maybe I should refactor it into 2 seperate blog posts using the ExtractClass method?