Doron's .NET Space : ReSharper

Selling ReSharper

dorony — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 17:19:20 GMT

At my workplace we've bought ReSharper licenses for everyone. Still, some of the developers refuse to use it. They say it is too slow for them to use. It's true this software has serious performance issues. If I try to open three instances of visual studio with ReSharper on, my dual-core computer with 2GB of RAM will choke to death. I guess there's a reason it lets you display the amount of managed memory it's using in Visual Studio's status bar (that's rather like admiting in defeat, "we know our software is a memory hog, we've given up on that, but we'll at least let you know how screwed you are at any given moment").

And yet, I claim that it's totally worth it. So I try to work with less solutions open, in order to gain the incredible benefits ReSharper gives me. I honestly can't work without it anymore. It has changed the way I code, and I will never attempt a serious refactoring without it. But how should I sell it to the other developers? Convince them to give it another go and put the performance issues aside? Well, I created a presentation to demonstrate this software's various benefits (my dear ctrl+n, I would marry you right now if I could), but then I found this video, which says it all: the ReSharper Jedi at work.

This video shows how ReSharper allows you to 'code in reverse'. First write the usage of your classes and methods, and let ReSharper create them for you. Sounds like it could be great for TDD, isn't it? Well it is, only for now ReSharper doesn't know to create the classes for you in a different project (usually your tests won't be in the same project as the code). This plugin here might do the trick, though it is still a very early version, which makes some problematic assumptions (but the code is there, so you are welcome to help).

Anyway, guys, if you're reading this - get over it already. ReSharper will own you eventually, you'll see.

Restoring Shift+Tab in ReSharper

dorony — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 04:20:00 GMT

Since we installed ReSharper, we've noticed that the Shift+Tab shortcut has stopped working, which was a great annoyance to my team (ReSharper still rules, you ungrateful bastards). After some googling, the following forum post provided the solution:

Go to Visual Studio options -> Environment -> Keyboard.
Choose the action Edit.DecreaseLineIndent.
Change the scope to "Text Editor" (where it says "Global"), otherwise the following step won't work.
Hit Shift+Tab.
Assign.
You're good to go.

Hopefully JetBrains will get around to fixing this in the next version.

ReSharper + Orcas = Bad

dorony — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 20:36:24 GMT

A small warning: Do not install the pre-release of ReSharper 3.0 on Visual Studio Orcas. Although the installation works, ReSharper does not handle the C# 3.0 syntax correctly (it really doesn't like x => x+1 syntax), and the intellisense gets all screwed up. Trying to uninstall ReSharper 3.0 resulted in my VS Orcas having an empty "ReSharper" menu, and with the intellisense gone, which I had to fix manually (by scanning the options menu for about an hour for the right option). To add to the fun, my installed ReSharper 2.5, which is installed on VS2005, has lost its highlighting features in the process, so I had to reinstall the 2.5 version. Fun.

Resharped

dorony — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 11:15:48 GMT

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...