I agree - refactoring has become a bucket for all excuses. I believe it has its place but at a higher level than the method level. All code should be intended as production at all times. As needs change and grow then refactoring original design is warranted. Recognizing this allows us to not over-design for perceived future needs - especially when they always change and thus our design becomes wrong anyways. A systemic lack of comments and indicators like multiple return points (amongst many other subtleties) by a "senior" developer indicates a lack of personal drive to improve one's self (read a friggin' book!) - a lack of professionalism. These are the shots over the bow of not caring and likely bad, buggy code.

Anders Hejlsberg...but I doubt he's used it as much as some of us.

I'm using Avant right now and I must say it seems fast but didn't seem to load Codeproject any faster. ;( Unfortunatly Avant has a bad case of featuritus. My parents would be back in IE in seconds after looking at all of those buttons. So Firefox it is for me (even though I secretly love Microsoft...shhhhh). I do love having multiple choices though: 1) IE for that old-school charm 2) Firefox for when I want to increase security and usability for the average person with the option to extend the feature set. 3) Avant when I want every feature under the sun right in front of me which I can clean up by digging though menus. So can't we all just stop evangelizing and get along? > 3. The community is very polarized. Community or fractured geek user group?

My question is why are you even trying to assign an integer to an enum? Whatever it is be aware of the very useful Enum.Parse For instance, in the case of persisting to fule it might be better to use the enum's name incase the enum's underlyng value was ever changed.