Wrox - Professional Refactoring In Visual Basic

Thank you for choosing this book and welcome to the fabulous world of refactoring. I hope you will find this book useful as you go about your daily programming chores, as you discuss different design solutions with your peers, when you are getting ready to attack some obscure legacy code, and even as you are going over some lines in your mind that are keeping you awake at night. If this is your first encounter with refactoring, I expect this book to profoundly change the way you program and think about code. This is not an easy task to complete, and, ultimately, you will be the judge of how successful I was.

I adopted refactoring in a systematic manner after I read the book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler (Addison-Wesley, 1999). This book proved to be down-to-earth practical, helping me learn some indispensable techniques that I could apply in real-life projects right away. The book was not based on some complex theory, nor did it contain any complex mathematical formulas.

It spoke in language immediately understood by anyone writing the code. Soon after I read the book, I noticed a number of changes in the way I program:
+ I was able to detect with much greater certainty problematic code and design flows.
+I was able to think of solutions for those problems and resolve them effectively through refactoring.
+ When talking to my peers, I was able to argue for my decisions in a clear and concise manner.

Finally, I stopped looking at the code as some solid structure constant in time, and started viewing it as a plastic, moldable form that I can fashion to my liking and in accordance with my needs. This provoked a fundamental change in the way I treat code. I realized that there is a way to modify code in an efficient, predictable manner and improve its design in the process.

Soon, the word about refactoring started to spread inside the team I worked with, and I saw more and more of my coworkers taking the book from the shelf. A few even got their own copies. I was able to speak with them using refactoring terminology and introduce refactoring as an integral part of the software construction process. Even the management proved to be forward-looking in this respect.

Partly because of my own interest in learning different languages and technologies, and partly because of the necessities that I am often presented with at my workplace, I get to work with different teams and program in different languages. I tried disseminating refactoring when working with teams that program in Visual Basic in a similar manner I did with Java or C# teams. This proved to not go that smoothly. Soon I realized there is very little information on refactoring available for Visual Basic programmers. While most of the refactorings can be applied in a similar manner in any object-oriented programming language, there are some subtle differences.There is no reason why a programmer should not learn to refactor by looking at code examples written in his language of preference.

This inspired me to think more about refactoring in Visual Basic and finally to write this book. I am convinced that there is a real need for such a text and that this book will be of practical use to many who program in Visual Basic.