How to do effective refactoring using VS Studio 2005/2008

Answer 1

Resharper. The first few weeks after I installed it, I found something new and useful every day. The best ones are sometimes incredibly simple but they automate an activity that is usually so tedious that I go insane having to work on a machine with no Resharper installed. For example, "move this class out into a separate file named after it" means I mostly just type code, and never have to add files to the project by hand.

Answer 2

ReSharper could be an option.

Answer 3

I much prefer CodeRush Xpress to Resharper, since the latter brings my machine to a crawl. See the link for a list of features.

HTH, Kent

Answer 4

I use Resharper as well and is really happy with it, but if all you have is VS it is still a lot better than nothing. The good thing about the (limited) refactoring options in VS is that they are pretty lightweight compared to Resharper and they do support some very useful features.

Answer 5

Use one of Resharper or CodeRush&RefactorPro (or the free CodeRush Xpress)

I personally think CodeRush/RefactorPro is the cats pajamas - but reasonable people have been know to prefer Resharper.

Both tools offer a wealth of code templates, refactoring tools, and analysis allowing you to think more about the intent and logic of the code and less about the mechanics of typing the code.

Here's a list of RefactorPro refactorings

A key differentiator for CodeRush/RefactorPro is the quality of the UI. Whereas Resharper looks like the UI was developed by programmers, CodeRush/RefactorPro looks like it was designed by a designer. Addititonally CodeRush helps on the inital writting of code everything from basic declarations (classes, functions, vars, etc) to complex statments. For instance, just watch the 'sw ' template go to town on an enumerated type.

Worth every penny.

Answer 6

DevExpress providing some free tools. Please check it.

Answer 7

For the "experience" part, you can check out this book:

Professional Refactoring in C# & ASP.NET