Help your (VB6) Code Shine

One of the reasons that I haven't been posting of late, is down to one Warren Sirota. He is the developer behind CodeShine, a refactoring addin for VB6.

Yes that's right. I said VB6....Codeshine does not attempt to compete on the same level as RefactorPro. Indeed it does not really compete at all, given that DevExpress have no interest in the VB6 space. (A fact I checked over with both Mark Miller and Ray Navasarkian) but it does manage to provide some of the fundamentals that are so hard to do without once you have been exposed to.

I'm talking about... 'Extract Method', 'Extract Function' and 'Introduce Explaining Variable'.

When I first approached Warren about his software I wanted to know if he had any plans to implement any form of 'Rename' (Local, Parameter, Field) or whether I would get any of the source to CodeShine with my purchase.

Although Warren does not generally share the source to his product, he indicated that we might be willing to collaborate somewhat in light of the fact that I was more that happy to contribute any changes back to the primary source for him to include.

And thus we find ourselves at a point at which I have managed (I think) to have produced a fairly workable 'Rename Var' refactoring which can be used to rename a private field, local variable or method parameter from either their declarations or indeed a reference to said variable.

We are undergoing a period of testing now and this refactoring may well make it into the commercial product. (US$74.95 at the time of this Blog post)

I am very excited to be able to help bring this sort of functionality to VB6.

So if you think this facility might be of use to you or you know someone else who might benefit, send them along to http://www.codeshine.com/CodeShine/default.htm and let's see if we can't help your code to shine that little bit more :)