Monthly Archives: April 2019

I've previously mentioned that one of the traits of legacy code is that it lacks documentation or the existing documentation is of inferior quality. Let me now provide some guidance on how to document a legacy code project, or any project for that matter. Start With the Overview The minimum amount of documentation a piece of software has must be a description of what the software does. What problem is it trying to solve? A next step would be a high overview of how this problem is solved. Don't document the nitty-gritty details yet. Just a description…

Several years ago, I recently received a question from a former colleague regarding the .NET Framework they were using for their application. The question was: should we regard .NET 4.6.2 as legacy? The question that follows from this is: should we make the effort of moving to a newer version or to .NET (Core)? While it has been several years, this article is still one of my more popular ones, making me think still a lot of teams are struggling with this question. Which is also why I keep updating it. Even if you're not using .NET,…

In any project, there quickly arises a need for what we call refactoring. This is especially true in legacy projects. But what do we mean by refactoring exactly, and why is it so important? Refactoring: New Wine in Old Bottles? Wikipedia defines refactoring as follows: Code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code—changing the factoring—without changing its external behavior. Refactoring improves nonfunctional attributes of the software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_refactoring So what this means is that developers change the underlying structure of the code, i.e. change the implementation, of existing features and functionality. But those existing features and…