Another Way to Think about Code Reuse

Anyone who practices Object Oriented Programming has a lot of different ways to reuse code. The most common way is to use inheritance, but recently I have been reusing code in an unconventional way.

Whenever I create a class I follow a strict convention on naming properties. Here is an example:

1. public class Movie
2. {
3.     public string Title { get; set; }
4.     public List<People> Actors { get; set; }
5.  
6.     public DateTime ReleaseDate { get; set; }
7.     public double MoneyEarnedToDate { get; set; }
8.  
9.     public string Producer { get; set; }
10.     public string Genre { get; set; }
11. }

CamelCase is the convention I use to define every property. I always use complete words and never use abbreviations. I do not use underscores in public properties. I stick to this convention because it lets me extract Meta data from the class while it is in use and can be used to simplify coding of the UI.

1. public class CustomGrid : DataGrid
2. {
3.     public CustomGrid()
4.         : base()
5.     {
6.         AutoGenerateColumns = true;
7.         AutoGeneratingColumn += new EventHandler<DataGridAutoGeneratingColumnEventArgs>(OnAutoGeneratingColumn);
8.     }
9.  
10.     void OnAutoGeneratingColumn(object sender, DataGridAutoGeneratingColumnEventArgs e)
11.     {
12.         string sHeader = e.Column.Header.ToString();
13.         e.Column.Header = CamelToTitleCase(sHeader);
14.     }
15.  
16.     public string CamelToTitleCase(string Text)
17.     {
18.         Text = Text.Substring(0, 1).ToUpper() + Text.Substring(1);
19.         return Regex.Replace(Text, @"(\B[A-Z])", @" $1");
20.     }
21.  
22. }

Via inheritance I can customize the standard Silverlight DataGrid to automatically generate columns for whatever class is bound to it. I sign up for the OnAutoGeneratingColumn event so I can rename the column headings. The function CamelToTitleCase will automatically insert spaces before each capitol letter, so the property ReleaseDate becomes the header Release Date and the property MoneyEarnedToDate becomes Money Earned To Date

So is using a coding convention really code reuse or is it more like asset repurposing? I have learned that having a convention makes my code easier to read and debug. It also leads to even more advanced techniques I will share in later blogs.