Help your helper classes by defining their context & responsibility at class design time, and applying refactoring techniques.
Each class should state clearly what are its responsibilities and roles in the context it is located in.
Appending the keyword helper to classes is getting misused and becoming a bad habit. Imagine having code with 30 or more helper classes, first people would start thanking language designer that they made use of namespaces, still this does not remove the ambiguity from helper classes and the duplication of code that is occurring in them.
The idea of a class to be helper to another class bounds its responsibility to helping a specified class or set of specified classes, and this causes less use of helper class in libraries or small frameworks, because most of the time there is no specified role for the helper class except helping and this is an ambiguous role because it could be anything!
This problem can be solved by defining unambiguous responsibilities and roles to the class, and naming the class with a name that reflects its responsibilities and roles, in addition that the class exposed functions and methods should satisfy the class responsibilities and roles. I recommend applying refactoring techniques available on http://www.refactoring.com/catalog/index.html, the following refactoring techniques are the most beneficial for such scenario "Extract Superclass", "Extract Class", "Extract Subclass", "Move Class".
All classes communicate & help each other under specified roles and responsibilities, these factors are the constraints that make system responsibilities and roles clear and maintainable. Misusing the helper concept causes the formation of an ambiguous system.
Take the following very basic and simple example:
We have a class called ‘Help’ that is responsible for viewing a special help file, and we have another class that helps the ‘Help’ class, I am going to name it as some programmers are doing these days, we will call the class ‘HelpHelper’ it saves and reads special help files. This is an example of bad naming that does not reflect the class responsibilities and roles.
While we can name the preceding classes as the following and specify unambiguous responsibilities and roles:
The ‘Help’ can be named ‘HelpViewer’ that has the responsibility and role of viewing a special help file, and the ‘HelpHelper’ helper class to ‘HelpFileManager’ that is responsible for managing the saving and reading, this a clear specification, that allows better maintainability and clear extension of classes in a framework or library.
My advice is to decrease the use of naming classes as helpers and work on specifying unambiguous responsibilities and roles for classes, to allow people working in this domain to have better understanding of the classes they are dealing with, for maintenance, testing, extendibility, effective use reasons.
Is there a class named with the Helper keyword in .net Framework? And if there exists, what is the number?
Sincerely
Rabeeh Abla