Avoid Much Talk
I wrote about Resharper 4 performance improvements in an earlier blog post today showing my VS Color Scheme including use of R# nightly builds. My friend Mohamed Tayseer pointed me out that Resharper 4 BETA was released yesterday. If you already know Resharper, skip the blah blah blah talk and get to the download.
Resharper, AKA R#, Who ???
Resharper used to be a must-have add-in for Visual Studio. It completes the features existing in Visual Studio like intellisense (not just smarter intellisense, but also available everywhere, like those areas in ASP.NET markup when you start typing non-standard code to Visual Studio to hook some properties and you get lost alone usually).
Of course it makes the expected enhancements to standard VS editor like parentheses and semicolon completion and other similar features, although it takes you w while to get used to stopping writing those after R# writes them for you!
It also has interesting stuff like SPEED find options (instead of this "Compiling the Solution" messages whenever you want to "Find Reference") also extended for things like 2-way jump between the base classes / interfaces and their children classes/methods. ad also tons of "Guideline promoting" features like intellisense for VARIABLE names (like when you type "MailMessage" for local variable type, it recommends names like "mailMessage", "message", etc...), and options to detect unused variables and "using" namespace directives, and many other features.
It also offers very handy icons that do interesting stuff like inverting "if" statements and reversing assignments (very handy in ASP.NET donkey code behind files, in an edit page, call on page load a method with all txtProductName.Text = currentProduct.ProductName;, copy that to the method that's called from the "Save" button click, select it and click "Reverse Assignment"), and many great other features appearing as very small icons to the left of the code to not interrupt your work.
It's also smart. It can realize that Console.WriteLine("{0}, {1}", object0); will fail because the string format method is a "string formatter method" and it expects two objects while I passed only one! It has tons of interesting warnings and recommendations like this. Leave apart small features like quick use of "var" instead of type and suggesting and quickly applying conversion of normal static method to extension method, and so many other features.
For more advanced users than me it has advanced code snippets style and advanced template engine and advanced plug-in model for extending all features it offers (some interesting plug-ins), but I never used those ... too advanced for my "code monkey" use of VS :D. It even has integration with Testing frameworks, although TestDriven.NET already also handles this for me.
Resharper - Major Turnoff Removed
Earlier, the worst thing that prevented me totally from recommending it to friends (besides the price, I believe it is expensive [$199 for personal use, $149 if skipping VB.NET support], especially when you convert US dollar$ to Egyptian pounds :D) was the performance issue. With a 15+ VS solution each of over 15 classes (not small ones), you get slow down at project opening and many times at typing (while it's trying to get the smart intellisense or other great features to me).
This also cost A LOT of memory. I had a friend who installed it only in code review sessions and uninstalled it just after the code review because how greedy it is in terms of RAM. Things got a little better from R# 2 to 3, but also my work got bigger at the same time, so, it felt tedious.
Now with Resharper 4 (still in BETA) this is no longer an issue. I totally do not notice a difference in Visual Studio whether Resharper is there or not. This makes it great to develop and complete the parts that are missing and are actually must-have features Microsoft is missing in Visual Studio. It's a really elegant piece of work.
I'd still worry about pricing, especially vs. FREE Visual Studio (you get via your company's MSDN subscription usually, so, it "feels" free to you), but this is another story.
Reshaper 4 BETA News / Download
In my last post, I put a note about R# 4 nightly builds performance that more than anybody targeted mainly Mohamed Tayseer, my colleague who used R# only in some code review sessions and uninstalled it just after. A few hours later he returned the favor by pointing me out that R# 4 BETA was announced yesterday.
BTW, if you haven't guessed already, R# 4 BETA is a FREE evaluation version.
Here are the related resources: