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Give your feedback straight to the authors themselves and chat to other early readers on our Discord server (find the "software-architecture-csharp-12-dotnet-8" channel under EARLY ACCESS SUBSCRIPTION).

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Code reusability is one of the most important topics in software architecture. This chapter aims to discuss ways to enable code reuse, as well as to help you understand how .NET 8 solves the problem of managing and maintaining a reusable library.The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Understanding the principles of code reuse
• The advantages of working with .NET 8
• Creating reusable libraries using .NET 8

Although code reuse is an exceptional practice, as a software architect you must be aware when this is important for the scenario you are dealing with. Many good software architects agree that there is a lot of overengineering due to trying to make things reusable even though...

Technical requirements

For this chapter you will need the free Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition or better with all the database tools installed.

Understanding the principles of code reusability

There is a single reason that you can always use to justify code reuse – you cannot spend your valuable time reinventing the wheel if it is already running well in other scenarios. That is why most engineering domains are based on reusability principles. Think about the light switches you have in your house.Can you imagine the number of applications that can be made with the same interface components? The fundamentals of code reuse are the same. Again, it is a matter of planning a good solution so part of it can be reused later.In software engineering, code reuse is one of the techniques that can bring a software project a bunch of advantages, such as the following:

• There is confidence in the software, considering that the reused piece of code was already tested in another application.
• There is better usage of software architects and the senior team since they can be dedicated to solving this kind of problem.
• There is the possibility...

5 Implementing Code Reusability in C# 12

Before you begin: join our book community on Discord

Give your feedback straight to the authors themselves and chat to other early readers on our Discord server (find the "software-architecture-csharp-12-dotnet-8" channel under EARLY ACCESS SUBSCRIPTION).

https://packt.link/EarlyAccess

Code reusability is one of the most important topics in software architecture. This chapter aims to discuss ways to enable code reuse, as well as to help you understand how .NET 8 solves the problem of managing and maintaining a reusable library.The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Understanding the principles of code reuse
• The advantages of working with .NET 8
• Creating reusable libraries using .NET 8

Although code reuse is an exceptional practice, as a software architect you must be aware when this is important for the scenario you are dealing with. Many good software architects agree that there is a lot of overengineering due to trying...

Summary

This chapter aimed to help you understand the advantages of code reuse. It also gave you an idea about what is not properly reused code. This chapter also presented approaches for reusing and refactoring code.Considering that technology without processes does not take you anywhere, a process was presented that helps enable code reuse. This process is related to using already completed components from your library; identifying features in the software requirements specification that are candidates to be designed as library components; modifying the specification considering these features; designing the reusable components; and building the project architecture with the new component library version.Concluding this chapter, we presented .NET Standard libraries as an approach to reusing code for different C# platforms, indicating that .NET 8 and new versions shall be used for reusing code in different platforms. This chapter also reinforced the principles of object-oriented programming...

Questions

1. Can copy-and-paste be considered code reuse? What are the impacts of this approach?
2. How can you make use of code reuse without copying and pasting code?
3. Is there a process that can help with code reuse?
4. What is the difference between .NET Standard and .NET Core?
5. What are the advantages of creating a .NET Standard library?
6. How does object-oriented analysis help with code reuse?
7. How do generics help with code reuse?
8. Will .NET Standard be replaced with .NET 6?
9. What are the challenges related to refactoring?

Further reading

These are some books and websites where you will find more information about the topics covered in this chapter:

• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftmanship by Martin, Robert C. Pearson Education, 2012.
• Clean Architecture: A Craftsman’s Guide to Software Structure and Design by Martin, Robert C. Pearson Education, 2018.
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erica Gamma [et al.] Addison-Wesley, 1994.
• Design Principles and Design Patterns by Robert C. Martin, 2000.
• Refactoring by Martin Fowler, 2018.
• https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-standard/
• https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/net-standard-20-cookbook
• https://github.com/dotnet/standard/
• https://docs.microsoft.com/pt-br/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/generics/
• https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/the-future-of-net-standard/
• https://dotnet.github.io/docfx/
• https://github.com/domaindrivendev/Swashbuckle.AspNetCore
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en...