Notes on cleaning up shitty source code

This is just a note to myself on what procedures I take to clean up source code. This occurs because of the basic development cycle in trying to get something to work with complicated APIs, which goes something like this:

1. I search the web to find something that supposedly works, i.e., it was written by someone of authority, e.g. Microsoft, and was checked into Github.
2. I copy and paste snippets into my code and try it out.
3. It usually doesn’t work because the APIs were changed or gone obsolete, or I’m trying to add in something that isn’t compatible with other code. If it doesn’t work, I go back and try something else.
4. After a bunch of iterations of adding in useless code, I find something that works and check it in.
5. I now have to clean up the code, full of garbage from snippets.

To clean the code, I employ several tools: Resharper, CodeMaid, and Visual Studio IDE. I do not know what Visual Studio Code does, nor do I care because it is such a poor development environment. I mentioned some of the problems in a previous post.

• The first step is to reorder all the garbage so that classes have elements of fields, properties, and methods ordered, and each element is ordered alphabetically. To reorganize, select the document, then right-click and select “CodeMaid->Reorganize Active Document”. Note, if you have preprocessor directives, CodeMaid will not observe them in the reorganization. You should push any pragmas into the project .csproj file.
• Use VS 2019 “Analyze => Code Cleanup”. This feature was just added, and contains numerous fix-ups: “Apply object/collection initialization preferences”; “Apply expression/block body preferences”; “Apply ‘this.’ qualification preferences”; “Sort usings”; “Remove unnecessary usings”; “Apply implicit/explicit type preferences”; “Remove unused variables”; “Remove unnecessary casts”; “Apply inline ‘out’ variable preferences”; “Add accessibility modifiers”; “Sort accessibility modifiers”; “Make private fields read-only when possible”; “Apply language/framework type preferences”; “Add/remove braces for single-line control statements”. You might want to check-in your code prior to these changes.
• Remove manually any .cs file that is unused.
• Test using “Find all references” and remove manually any unused fields, properties, methods, and types. Note, take care to not remove any unused elements or classes that APIs are expecting.
• Set tabs to 4 spaces, and replace them with spaces.
• I personally do not care for most code document comments and usually strip all comments from code. They clutter the entire meaning of the code. The code should speak for itself. If you can’t understand your code, you should not program.
• Strip all #regions. It is a stupid concept and a waste of a compiler directive. It is better to use a proper development environment that does this for you.