Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. Its heart is a series of small behavior preserving transformations. Each transformation (called a ‘refactoring’) does little, but a sequence of transformations can produce a significant restructuring. Since each refactoring is small, it’s less likely to go wrong. The system is also kept fully working after each small refactoring, reducing the chances that a system can get seriously broken during the restructuring.  — Martin Fowler  http://www.refactoring.com/

In other words, refactoring is making your code cleaner, safer, and easier to use. Understand can be a very powerful tool in your re-factoring arsenal. Here are a few ways you can use Understand in your refactoring process.

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Your code is beautiful, formatted to your liking and spaced just how you want it, but sometimes you have to work with other people’s code – yuck! If only there was something that would make it look like your code, instead of spaghetti. Artistic Style, or astyle as it is also known, is a great open source application that does exactly that.

So you can quickly turn this:

Into this:

We plan on implementing astyle into the editor at some point in the future, but I’m not so patient, and I decided to use our plugin mechanism to do it now, and will show you how.

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