Recently Packt Publishing sent me a copy of ‘Refactoring with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010’ by Peter Ritchie, I have to say I have rather impressed by it.
My only major issue with it is that of the title, this book covers much more than the refactoring features of 2010. It provides a very clear example driven discussion of the use and application of both refactoring patterns and design patterns. I think this would be an excellent book for a developer who want to start to apply design patterns to their C# code. The examples being more real world than Head First’s ‘Design Patterns’ (and the examples are in C# as opposed to Java) and the book being a far easier read than the classic ‘Design patterns : elements of reusable object-oriented software’
It is telling how much the book contents differs from the title that one of the most common sentences seems to be ‘that this is a not a build in automated refactoring in Visual Studio 2010’. Even though this appears fairly regularly the author goes onto explain how this limitation can be addressed in nice practical ways, interesting choosing to not mention third party refactoring tools until virtual the last page of the book.
Basically this book discuses theory in a nice accessible manner. It is not a simple ‘click here to do this’ tooling reference, don’t let the title fool you. It is well worth the read, you can see a sample ‘Chapter No 6 “Improving Class Quality’ online at Packt