Best way to get rid of hungarian notation?

Question

Let's say you've inherited a C# codebase that uses one class with 200 static methods to provide core functionality (such as database lookups). Of the many nightmares in that class, there's copious use of Hungarian notation (the bad kind).

Would you refactor the variable names to remove the Hungarian notation, or would you leave them alone?

If you chose to change all the variables to remove Hungarian notation, what would be your method?

Answer 1

Right click on the variable name, Refactor -> Rename.

There are VS add-ins that do this as well, but the built-in method works fine for me.

Answer 2

Only change it when you directly use it. And make sure you have a testbench ready to apply to ensure it still works.

Answer 3

It sounds to me like the bigger problem is that 200-method God Object class. I'd suggest that refactoring just to remove the Hungarian notation is a low-value, high-risk activity in of itself. Unless there's a copious set of automated unit tests around that class to give you some confidence in your refactoring, I think you should leave it well and truly alone.

I guess it's unlikely that such a set of tests exists, because a developer following TDD practices would (hopefully) have naturally avoided building a god object in the first place - it would be very difficult to write comprehensive tests for.

Eliminating the god object and getting a unit test base in place is of higher value, however. My advice would be to look for opportunities to refactor the class itself - perhaps when a suitable business requirement/change comes along that necessitates a change to that code (and thus hopefully comes with some system & regression testing bought and paid for). You might not be able to justify the effort of refactoring the whole thing in one go, but you can do it piece by piece as the opportunity comes along, and test-drive the changes. In this way you can slowly convert the spaghetti code into a cleaner code base with comprehensive unit tests, bit by bit.

And you can eliminate the Hungarian as you go, if you like.

Answer 4

if you're feeling lucky and just want the Hungarian to go away, isolate the Hungarian prefixes that are used and try a search and replace in file to replace them with nothing, then do a clean and rebuild. If the number of errors is small, just fix it. If the number of errors is huge, go back and break it up into logical (by domain) classes first, then rename individually (the IDE will help)

Answer 5

I used to use it religiously back in the VB6 days, but stopped when VB.NET came out because that's what the new VB guidelines said. Other developers didn't. So, we’ve got a lot of old code with it. When I do maintenance on code I remove the notation from the functions/methods/sub I touch. I wouldn't remove it all at once unless you've got really good unit tests for everything and can run them to prove that nothing's broken.

Answer 6

Just leave it alone. There are better uses of your time.