I’ve always wanted to go back and refactor my first program I wrote right out of school. But although I could find my hastily scrounged together notes on the application, alas I could not find the source.
But recently while cleaning off some external hard drives, I found it. And maybe I did a jig with delight. … maybe.
Why do I care? Not because the application would be of use, but because I wrote it. I wrote it straight from school, with no senior or experienced developer around for guidance. I’ve never heard of source control, testing, design patterns.. or anything. I had no .Net experience and had to figure out everything on my own.
I was a reimbursement analyst and I programmed on the side. This application was meant to replace self created unwieldy access databases and queries. Turn an adhoc process to an automated one. And the crazy thing was… it worked. I turned my job into a button pushing operation where I could spend most of my days reading a book or surfing the internet as the application would churn through data.
I turned a day or two process into a 30 minute turn around. When the negotiations for rates were going on, I could give the team almost instant turn around on proposed rate changes. It was a major win.
Anyway, now… 5 years later, I have a unique chance to refactor my own code. Take a WinForms application written by a junior developer in .Net 1.0 and update everything to better coding standards and .Net 4.0.
I don’t have a plan, nor do I want one. I am just going to open the application up and start fiddling. I want to go piece by piece. Slowly add tests and update the code. I want the work to be a demonstration on how to take a legacy application and not just rewrite, but refactor it to better standards and updated frameworks.
Word to the wise, there is some VB and C# projects (I had to install VB for my Visual Studio because normally I leave it out). Also the application won’t run at first because I don’t have a database and I noticed some projects failed to build. And the project structure is whack. But that will be fixed in time.
Check out the original code at : http://github.com/RookieOne/RMS_Refactor
0 comments:
Post a Comment