Monday, August 31, 2009

Is it too late to wrap it into a function?

Today I was refactoring several properties in a Business Class from int to int?. I was in a hurry, so I was implementing the 10 properties using cut and paste inheritance (as if that is ever really faster).

After the 8th or 9th properties, the light went off in my mind: I should write a couple of functions to do the hard work and call the functions from the property get and set functions. Was it too late to to do it right?

I said NO.It did take me longer to write the functions than it would have taken to cut and past the 2 remaining properties. However, the code is easier to read, validate and change.

I guess I justify my earlier sloppy coding time as an opportunity to think of the right way. During the first go round I was planning to do the second one; I needed to do it wrong to see how to do it right.