Over the last couple of years, refactoring tools have become a part of every self-respecting development system. For those not in the know, what we’re really talking about are automated mechanisms for slicing and dicing your existing code to make it more maintainable, better structured for reuse, and so on.

You might imagine that something like Refactor Pro would be essentially redundant due to the advent of Visual Studio 2005. After all, Microsoft’s latest flagship development system contains some built-in refactoring mechanisms of its own, just like the freebie Express Editions. However, Refactor Pro goes far beyond the refactoring capabilities provided by the barefoot IDE.

We looked at an early version of Refactor Pro ten months ago, when it was working with a beta copy of VS.NET 2005. At the time, we commented that it used some pretty spectacular graphical effects to suggest refactoring changes in the code editor. Well, it’s got a lot more spectacular since then…

Like CodeRush from the same company, Refactor Pro is built around a powerful, managed code toolkit called DXCore, and it’s this that allows the utility to integrate so tightly with VS.NET. Numerous refactorings are available ranging from trivial, through deeply cool to somewhat questionable – take a look at the screenshot on the product’s home page.

You can do all the usual stuff such as renaming variables and parameter arguments, but Refactor Pro will also let you reorder method parameters and will, at the same time, modify all the points where that method is called. A terrific feature – still my favourite! – is the ability to pull a chunk of existing code out of a method, promoting it to a method in its own right.

String literals and numeric constants can be easily promoted to const declarations, and this is especially useful where a long string is used several times in the same chunk of code.

What makes Refactor Pro really stand out are the graphics that appear over the top of your source to illustrate what a proposed refactoring will do. And you can even use DXCore in your own projects.