Reusing Code

Abstract

Up To This Point you have written a fair amount of code. In fact, if you do a line count, you will find out that it comes to about 3,624 lines of code (this includes blank lines and Windows Forms-generated code, but not comments). That is a lot of work for just two sets of classes that retrieve only two tables worth of data. In this chapter you will look at two ways of reducing the amount of code that your application needs. First, you will consolidate some of the code in your user-centric classes, and you will create a base class that you can use in your user-centric objects. After you do that, you will set up a couple of enterprise templates so that you can add standard blocks of code and just edit the parts you need to edit. In this manner, you might add 1,000 lines of code, but you only have to type about 50 lines. It makes for a much more streamlined development process, as you will see.