I often see superfluous use of Me.This and this.That lying around in code and it always bugged me, but tonight I found a reason it might be more than just my anal nature. Typing 'Me.' or 'this.' is not a clever way to fire up Visual Studio's Intellisense drop down. The Ctrl+<Space> keystroke is a much tidier, and quicker way of getting there.

Sure, there are circumstances where you need to use these keywords, for instance when you need to differentiate between your class and your base class. Me and MyBase, or this and base are valid ways to get around in that case.

The benefit of refraining from using these keywords until its necessary is that you could reduce the cognitive load on someone who has to understand your code. Every time you avoid the use of the Me keyword you will decrease your maintenance complexity score by 2 points every time you do so. In functions that address members heavily, this could represent a significant increase in the readability of your code.

So what is this metric, Maintenance Complexity? Its an idea coined by Mark Miller from Developer Express. Its been a feature in CodeRush and Refactor! Pro for some time now. The 2008 release of Visual Studio, codename Orcas will also provide code metrics visualisation. Simply, it recognizes the fact that the more code you write to achieve a goal, the harder that code is to maintain. That is to say, if you can achieve the same goal in less code, you have written it in a more maintainable fashion. It has been said before, the best developers code smaller.

Each type of construct attracts a score, much like letters do in the board game, Scrabble. At the end of a function you are scored by adding the values of each construct up. For a complete description of the metric, please visit Mark Millers blog entry on his creation.

There are some valid criticisms to this metric, and simply refactoring in aid of reducing MC scores is only cheating yourself. As such I suggest the reader use code metrics in general as an indicator rather than a developers divining rod.