So I have been testing a few different products and the latest one I have used is JustCode by Telerik. I’ve used DevExpress CodeRush and ReSharper, so in a way I am comparing the three.
Performance
Out of the three I would say JustCode had the best performance. The only time I really experienced JustCode causing VS 2010 to lag was when I opened a project and JustCode did it’s error checking. On the flip side Resharper probably caused VS 2010 to lag a little more, but not much and CodeRush made VS 2010 painful to use. So out of the three I would put JustCode the winner in performance. Didn’t cause my productivity to go down and my memory usage didn’t sky rocket. I would rate performance as Very Good.
Issues
Honestly, being a plugin for Visual Studio I really thought I would have a lot of issues, but I did not! The only issue I ran into was Intellisense stopped working for some odd reason, which was a pain. I was able to fix this by reinstalling and it seemed to come back. Annoying yes, but by no means a big deal.
Installation
Not much to say here, it’s pretty dumb proof to install. Close Visual Studio and a few clicks and you are set.
Time Saver?
So, did it save me time? I think did! My test code for this was a fairly large C# ASP.NET project that I inherited and it was, let’s say. Wordy. A lot of repetitive code that should be methods, etc. The Extract Method functionality was a huge time saver. Very easy to use and the methods it created were actually pretty well written and clean.
Code analysis seemed to work pretty well also. It is kind of picky and does make you feel dumb every once in a while, but that is not a bad thing. Personally I really like Resharper’s code analysis. But I do think JustCode does a pretty good job of it and by no means is it lacking.
The Code Cleaning functionality did a pretty good job of cleaning up some pretty messy code I had. Was it as picky as me on some of it? Probably not, but it did a fine job regardless. It saved me time and that is the big thing that counts for me.
Options
Ok, if you like to have settings to change, you got plenty of settings to play with in JustCode. It seems like every feature you can change in some way. Ability to change what is or isn’t a warning, error, All good. Check, you can do that. Ability to choose which code hints you want by language in Code Analysis. For Code Cleaning you can create profiles, which is nice if you are working for different clients and they all have different standards. Plus a lot more settings you have control over.
Cost
JustCode is $199 without the one year of updates and priority support and $249 with it. Resharper is $199 and CodeRush is $249.99. So they all kind of fit into the same price range.
Which one?
So which one would I buy? I think Resharper is a great product and I think CodeRush is dog slow (are dogs slow?). But also CodeRush has great features. But I think JustCode fits the price, has better performance than the other two (in my opinion) and it compares in features and the best part, the features seem to work pretty good! I will keep using it for sure. I think it’s a worthwhile product and well worth $199 and by far my favorite Telerik product. Couple kinks, but nothing major.
Price: $199
Price: $249 with one year of updates and priority support
Buy JustCode
I have to say Web Expression 4 is a nice improvement over Expression 3. I still use Web Expressions to do all the HTML front-end before I port it over to Visual Studio. Wish Visual Studio used more of the Expressions for the Web Development side.
Just thought I would point out a great book while I was thinking about it. "Essential C# 3.0: For .NET Framework 3.5, Second Edition", it is a very well written book. Mark Michaelis does a great job of covering a large range of great topics and does a great job of explaining how you do things and why you do things. I've been using it to teach C# to several people and have had great success in using it. I use this book daily as a reference and I always make sure to have it next to me.
Recently was looking for a book to use while I was training some developers and I came across "Beginning C# 3.0: An Introduction to Object Oriented Programming". Jack Purdum does an excellent job of explaining OOP, as well as the basics of development. I have had our developers reading through this book and they have been able to pick up on concepts very quickly. So if you need a good book, I would suggest taken a look at this one.
UPDATE: Link fixed.. sorry
I recently came across this blog post and tool on the The HP Security Laboratory Blogs. The tool is called Scrawlr and I have to say that it is a pretty nifty little tool. I've been playing with it this morning and have been pretty impressed, I will keep it handy to do some testing in the future! Check out the Blog post and tool over at: http://www.communities.hp.com/securitysoftware/blogs/spilabs/archive/2008/06/23/finding-sql-injection-with-scrawlr.aspx. With all the SQL Injection press lately, it's worth checking out!