I'm excited to announce our release of CodeIt.Once - Refactoring Add-In for VS 2003 and VS 2005.
CodeIt.Once functionally complete Beta for both Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 is currently available for download through our Beta Experience program. If you want download a copy for evaluation or to participate in Beta testing, fill out a simple form (name and email address) and we will contact you with download instructions.
Visit CodeIt.Once Refactoring Operations page for complete list of operations and their description.
When released, CodeIt.Once will be offered in a Community Edition (free) as well - the top 6 most frequently used refactoring operations will be available at no charge to VB developers within the VB 2005 IDE.
We consider the Community Edition to be extremely valuable to Visual Basic developers since Microsoft pulled refactoring from VB 2005. CodeIt.Once Community Edition will provide to VB developers the missing in VB 2005 refactorings just like the ones that come right out of the box with C#.
About Refactoring
For those who are not familiar with the term "refactoring", these are things you do every day and may not realize there is a term invented for that :)
Examples of refactoring operations are routine functions like
- renaming a variable, fields method, class or namespace
- moving code fragment of a long method into a separate method
- promoting local variable to a method parameter
- moving class from one namespace to another
- adding, removing method parameters or changing their order
Without automation tool all of the above can be done with the ordinary "search-and-replace" which typically turns into tedious and lengthy (several hours at times) process. The manual process also requires extensive testing to verify that the code still works.
Martin Fowler:
“The key to keeping code readable and modifiable is refactoring - for frameworks, in particular, but also for software in general.
So, what's the problem? Simply this: Refactoring is risky. It requires changes to working code that can introduce subtle bugs. Refactoring, if not done properly, can set you back days, even weeks.“
Here is where CodeIt.Once comes in handy - it will perform these operations for you in the matter of seconds while keep the source code syntactically correct and compilable. CodeIt.Once makes refactoring a snap!
About CodeIt.Once
CodeIt.Once provides the following refactoring commands to start with:
- Rename
- Extract Method
- Encapsulate Field
- Extract Interface
- Promote Local Variable to Parameter
- Remove Parameters
- Reorder Parameters
- Add Parameter
- Method to Property
- Property to Method
- Inline Variable
- Move Class
- Decompose Conditional
Visit CodeIt.Once Refactoring Operations page for operations description.
