How did you choose your Visual Studio productivity addon?

Question

I'm evaluating Visual Studio productivity addons for my development team, which includes some folks who are very new to C# and some folks who are very experienced. We don't use VB.NET. I personally like ReSharper, but before I suggest something that I personally like, I would like some opinions for and reasoning behind using a different addon.

Given the choice between ReSharper, CodeRush, and Visual Assist, which one did you choose and why?

For discussion, do you run more than one addon at a time? Or one not on this list? What are your thoughts on these addons?

Answer 1

Since we are developing in C++ the Visual Assist was the best choice for us. The ReSharper works only with C#, VB and XML. The Refactor++ is nice, but it literally hangs the VS for some minutes upon every massive change in the code. We have also tried different other tools but all of them has no support for the C++. The CodeRush is new for me, I'll evaluate it this weekend (thanks)

Answer 2

Personally I have tried several, but my preference is two:

1: TestDriven.NET - for simple testing; I tend to use it with Team Coverage which lets me see the coverage directly in the editor, even though the tests are NUnit (not MSTest) based.

2: a tiny add-on that lets me group files the same way the IDE does - simpler than editing the csproj (DependentUpon IIRC) by hand. From here, but there is an (unlinked) updated msi here with better support for choosing which file is the parent (hold [Ctrl] when choosing "Group Items")

I've never found I've needed ReSharper etc, but I should give it another try some day...

Answer 3

I too chose VisualAssist X because I work in native C++ so tools like ReSharper don't help me. I made my decision based on input from other preofessional developers I know and respect and on my successful experience using a trial version.

CodeRush supports C++ but I didn't know about it until just now. From what I see, it looks similar to VisualAssist X. I'd give them both a try.

BTW: If I were you I would only install one of these tools at a time. I don't know if you need to do this but it wouldn't surprise me if they had some unexpected interactions.

Answer 4

I recommend ReSharper 4.0 with VS 2008. It really offers the best refactoring commands.

ReSharper 4.0 has really been improved since it's beta. However, I heard that CodeRush had a better templating model. Personally, I rather have a powerful refactoring tool rather than a templating tool.

I suggest ReSharper 4.0

Answer 5

I downloaded both resharper and coderush trials. Initially I liked coderush a bit better. It seems a bit more polished and a bit more stable. But eventually I did go with resharper. Mainly because of the unit testing integration.

I don't really see why you have to choose for your development team though. In my last company everyone used the tools they liked. We all used VS 2005 and 2008(depending on the project) and svn for versioning as long as everyone used the same coding standards we didn't have much problems. Standardizing is good up to a point but it might be a good idea to give your developers some choice in what tools they want to use.

Answer 6

Almost everybody on the dev team here has ReSharper installed, however there are a lot of complaints about it slowing down Visual Studio.

Answer 7

I chose Refactor! Pro a couple of years or so ago because at that time it supported C#, VB, ASP.NET (and now JavaScript and C++). I use all of these languages. ReSharper only supported C# back then. VisualAssist may have been just C++. Plus at the time I was doing VB. Having chosen Refactor! then I'm now comfortable with its UI paradigm and so probably won't switch anytime soon. I'm also now using CodeRush Xpress because I can't afford the full CodeRush right now. (I did try ReSharper briefly back in 2005 when working at a client sit.)

Answer 8

I use VSCommands in my everyday coding. I adds great new features to VS and is free :) (visual studio gallery link)