Keep It Simple

31 January, 2008. 228 words.

Ran into another post from our MVP friend Dan Wahlen: How Would You Refactor this Code? #1. I don’t normally respond to these kinds of things because it always devolves into a my-code-is-bigger-than-your-code conversation (if you know what I mean, wink, wink, nudge, nudge). But this post struck me because, again, Mr. Wahlen is using new wizbang C# 3.0 language features for no particular reason. He seems to be finding ways to shoehorn new language features into solutions that would otherwise work perfectly fine using regular old C# 2.0 features.

But on to the refactoring. Here’s his code snippet:

string name = “mc_gross_1”; //The prefix and number are variable
string[] cartNames = { “item_number_", “item_name_", “mc_gross_", “quantity_" };
if (cartNames.Where(p => name.StartsWith(p)).Count() > 0)
{
//process name
}

I like to know what code is doing at a glance, but it’s not terribly obvious what that’s doing without comments or study. So first I would want to move the arcane C# 3.0 stuff into a clearly-named function. In this case an Extension method to extend the string object seems like a good idea. The end result might look something like this:

if( name.StartsWithAny( cartNames ) ) { }

That’s much easier to grasp. The actual implementation of StartsWithAny() doesn’t make much difference, but I certainly wouldn’t use Lambdas, LINQ, or Regex. What’s wrong with, you know, a loop?

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