Overview
Hello Devs,
Hope you are aware of Code Clean & Code Smell. Developing code over time is just as important as maintaining and improving code. One of the best ways to ensure code quality is to practice clean coding principles and avoid code smells. When you write code in any language, one thing you must know is that other people may read your code. If your code is not clean it is difficult to read & modify also, so the solution is you just need to implement Sonarlint. Let’s see some deep ideas about code clean and code smell with Sonarlint.
Introduction
Clean code is easily understood, clean, and easy to maintain. It helps with Vulnerabilities and Code Smells in your code. For a better overall experience, you can use Sonarlint for Visual Studio. Which is a free extension. Sonarlint is a popular code analysis tool that can be integrated into Visual Studio. It works by analyzing the written code, identifying potential problems, and suggesting improvements. It can detect a wide range of code smells, including those mentioned above.
What is Clean Code?
Coding that is a clean, maintainable, and modifiable piece of code is called clean code. It is code that follows best practices and has a clear structure. Code that is clean is easier to understand and maintain by other developers. It is also easier to debug and improve over time.
There are several principles of clean code that you should keep in mind when writing code:
- Use significant variable names and function names.
- Keep your code modular and organized.
- Use comments sparingly and only when necessary.
- Avoid duplication and use functions and classes to encapsulate functionality.
- Write tests to verify that your code is working properly.
These principles lead to more understandable, modifiable, and maintainable code.
What is Code Smell?
Code smell refers to code that is poorly written and difficult to maintain. Clean code principles are violated and developers’ understanding, and improvement are hindered. Code smells can be caused by many things, such as poor design decisions, lack of modularization, or overly complex logic.
Some common code smells include:
- Duplicate code
- Long functions or classes
- Nested conditionals
- Magic numbers or strings
- Code comments that explain what the code does instead of why.
Code smells can make it difficult to modify or improve code over time, leading to technical debt.
Configure Sonarlint in Visual Studio
Sonarlint is a code analysis tool that can help you detect code smells and other issues in your code. To get started with Sonarlint, you’ll need to install two extensions for Visual Studio.
Sonarlint uses a set of rules to detect code smells and other issues. You can enable or disable specific rules or create your own rules to detect specific issues.
As you write code, Sonarlint will highlight any issues it detects. You can also see a summary of all issues in the Sonarlint window. After installing this package to build your project and looking at the output window, you notice there are lots of warnings coming up.
How Sonarlint works
As you know we have a lot of warnings that are coming up we’re going to switch to the error list window to make this more explicit. There are many rules which we want to follow but, in some cases, we enforce them by static code analysis. You can see the code for the specific rule that you broke, and a short description explaining what exactly is wrong.
These types of warnings are a little used to us if nobody pays attention to them so there’s a way to enforce treating warnings as errors, you need to add a property inside of the property group add treat warnings as errors property and give it a value of true so we can enforce treating warnings as errors.
After applying this you need to rebuild your project and take a look at the output window you can see that suddenly instead of warnings that we had a moment ago we have an error and the build is failing this is generally a good thing because you get instant feedback. When you write code that does not pass code quality checks that you want to enforce in your solution another benefit is that your build pipelines are going to crash if you commit a piece of code that does not pass a code quality check, so this makes it very easy to enforce code quality across your entire team with Sonarlint.
There are some rules which are very opinionated and if you want to turn off certain rules to reduce the noise in your project, a very simple way to do this you can click show potential fixes and then you want to configure the severity of a specific rule and click on none. It will update on your editor config file also you can check these.
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Conclusion
Clean code and avoiding code smells are important principles for maintaining code quality. If you follow best practices and use tools like Sonarlint in Visual Studio for .net development then, your code will be easier to maintain, modify, and read. In the long run, you can avoid technical debt and improve your code more easily by doing this.