Resharped
I am rather ashamed to admit that up until now I've never really tried to use Resharper, the very well known Visual Studio add-in. Today I decided to give Resharper 2.5 a try and was really blown away. Comparing Visual Studio 2005 without Resharper to Visual Studio 2005 with Resharper, is like comparing Turbo Pascal to, well, Visual Studio 2005. There's really no match here.
It starts with the little things, like how it always adds a matching brace to any brace you use ({,[,(). It makes you think why the hell isn't this already built in in Visual Studio. Or how the Resharped Intellisense always show the entire list of method overloads, without you having to scroll in the 7 method overloads or resort to MSDN.
But then you get to see the really smart stuff. Like the Refactoring features, which again make VS2005 attempt at this look rather silly. I'm talking about stuff like "Replace Constructor With Factory Method" or "Pull Members Up" (allows you to move a method implementation/declaration to a base class/interface), but also about simpler things such as "Safe Delete" (ever wanted to delete a class and wasn't sure what will break?) or "Convert Method To Property".
And imagine my amazement when I noticed this:
Which gets converted to...
And another extremely cool one:
And I haven't started to talk about the Live Templates, which are like Code Snippets only a lot smarter, or all the navigation features (especially the way it understands inheritance hierarchies), or about the way it marks redundant "using" directives in gray. It really is simply brilliant, and this is me talking after playing with it for about an hour.
Now the only question that remains is how to get the bosses to buy us those 250$ licenses...