How to Make the Code Hard to Misuse?

With C# examples.

Photo by Alexandru Acea on Unsplash

Code that a developer writes will be reused by that developer sometimes later or by other developers. Code reuse is something that is used regularly — new functionality is developed on top of existing reusable components.

When you introduce new code, you have a great opportunity to try to make life a lot easier for everyone (including you in the future) who will reuse your code — you can write your code in such a way that it’s hard to misuse it! As a result, new functionality can be developed faster and contain fewer bugs.

Here is a list of ideas with examples of how to make the code hard to misuse:

Use immutable data types so that client code can’t cause side effects

Mutable data types are fairly easy to misuse. A simple modification to, for example, a property of an object can cause side effects if the object is used elsewhere.

public class Person
{
    public Person(Address address)
    {
        Address = address;
    }

    public Address Address { get; }
}

public class Address
{
    public Address(string city, string zipCode)
    {
        City = city;
        ZipCode = zipCode;
    }

    public string City { get; set; }
    public string ZipCode { get; set; }
}