Boolean types

Question

During code review I discovered many places of our C# code that looks like this:

if(IsValid()) {
     return true;
}
else {
     return false;
}

<

Answer 1

If you're absent-minded, it's easy to refactor some code from this:

private bool ConsiderTheOstrich()
{
    /* do ostrich things */

    if(someCondition && unpredictableThing == 5)
        return true;
    else
    {
        // log something
        return false;
    }
}

To this:

private void IsValid() { return (someCondition && unpredictableThing == 5); }

/* ... */

private void ConsiderTheOstrich()
{
    /* do ostrich things */

    if(IsValid())
        return true;
    else
        return false; // ostrichlogger logs it for us now
}

Without noticing the extra opportunity for brevity.