Resharper, has it changed your "programming" life?

Question

Hey,

We're thinking of getting Resharper and I would really be interested to hear from people who've used it and whether you get much out of it? Does it really speed up production and if you moved to anther job without it, would you miss it and why?

Thanks

Crafty

Answer 1

Hi,

I just love it! A few years ago it had some stability issues, etc, but the latest versions are perfectly fine. The features I use most are

• finding usages of methods, jumping to base or inheritor, etc. Its muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch faster then VS and it understands the syntax, so all the results are correct (not based on string search or any other crap)
• it highlights errors in code and gives you a menu to do quick fixes. This is the feature that probably saves the most time. You don't get all these stupid compile errors after hitting Build.
• the templates (whatever they call it) are quite nice as well, e.g. the built in override one (you type override in a class and just select the method you would like to override from the list), foreach that will sort out all the types for you, etc.

I am sure there are many more features.

I feel blind when I don't have installed now :)

Answer 2

The code analysis makes my code clearer and finds occasional bugs, so in that way it does speed up production because bugs are caught before testing phase. It also helps bring new developers up to speed because the code is cleaner.

Answer 3

Try it out... there's a free trial.

I've been using it for a year or so and don't really like coding much without it.

Answer 4

It helped me to write better and cleaner C# code. I would definitley buy and use it again. There are a couple of good threads about this topic:

• Is ReSharper worth the adjustment, is there a good tutorial for 4?
• What is your favorite use of Resharper?

Answer 5

I tried a beta when it came out a couple months ago. While I love tools that make my work easier, I felt like I was battling with ReSharper more than it was helping me work better. It was always suggesting ways to transform my code style, which was more of a distraction than a help. If I wanted to switch out var for the actual type, I would have done it in the first place!

It seemed to me that it placed too much emphasis on doing little things instead of big things, and required more direct intervention than quietly working in the background. I eventually bailed on it because I couldn't get it to conform to my coding style and I didn't want to conform to its.

Answer 6

I love it. It brings me up to the same speed as with Eclipse. In particular

• Integrated NUnit (and other frameworks) tests
• Ctrl-T - find type
• Ctrl-Shift-T - find resource
• More useful intellisense

v4 is somewhat buggy in terms of generics - I've got various squiggles in my ProtocolBuffer code because ReSharper thinks there's an error when the C# compiler is perfectly happy. Other than that though, it's a great product. I'd heartily recommend it.

Answer 7

Wow, thanks for the response. really helpful. Will deffo give it a try then.. We're getting more into the TDD and Extreme programming projects now.. So I’m hoping it will help with the whole Test first approach.

Thanks again.

Crafty

Answer 8

I'd recommend it. It gives you the information that FxCop will give before you compile. A lot of the stuff that people consider annoying can be toggled or toned down. Resharper can be configured to you specific policies. And it really has helped me to code better.

Answer 9

I would never go to another job without it. I will spend the money out of my own pocket if I have to. Resharper is an invaluable tool that I have missed dearly when I don't have it even for an hour.

Answer 10

I used to use it, but ever since they added all the refactoring features to VS 2005, I don't find it near as useful. Plus, in my experience, it was wrought with problems - it either slowed down my VS, or crashed on startup, and it had ALL kinds of problems with intellisense. Especially upon uninstall - VS would lose the ability to do all intellisense.

So I don't think it's that big a deal.

Answer 11

This is just my experience, so please don't down-mod, but I have only ever had problems with it. Like DotNetDaddy I find it usually fails to co-exist peacefully with the built-in Intellisense, and even when I asked it not to re-map my key bindings it did anyway. And as for uninstalling, it was impossible to get rid of. Also, I found it unbearably slow even on a relatively powerful machine (think it was dual CPU at the time).

Good luck with it, some people think it's wonderful.

Answer 12

Don't forget about Refactor! and CodeRush from DevXpress. I have generally found them to be faster while offerring pretty much the same functionality.

Answer 13

I've been using version 3.1 of resharper with VS 2005 for the past 2 or so years. The refactoring and code checking support is wonderful. The few times I've had to use Visual studio without it, I find myself constantly looking for the resharper features and missing them. I especially like the warnings and suggested on fixing code.

I do, however, have a complaint about performance. I'm unsure if its been improved since v3.1, however, I use it with some very large solution file (30+ assemblies, hundreds of classes), and it can really slow Visual Studio down. I do have frequent times when Visual Studio is locked as it attempts to do some code analysis.