Frans' comment about the amount of refactoring to complete prefetch in Self-Servicing got me thinking about what he and others might use to help with these types of tasks in Visual Studio.

I have been testing ReSharper for about 2 weeks and absolutely love it. Not only does it refactor, but it analyzes the code and helps you optimize and add namespaces; add variable declarations, methods, and properties; etc.

I just started testing CodeRush a couple of days ago and love it, too, for the templates. Saves me a lot of typing for particular code snippets and you can define your own. I added a few particular to LLBLGen Pro

Does anyone else have any experience with these or other add-ins? There are other add-ins I haven't tested, like AxTools CodeSmart and WholeTomato's VisualAssistX. I am sure there are others.

So many add-ins, so little time

Thanks,

Dave

Dave wrote:

Does anyone else have any experience with these or other add-ins? There are other add-ins I haven't tested, like AxTools CodeSmart and WholeTomato's VisualAssistX. I am sure there are others.

I use VisualAssistX... I love it for the syntax coloring ...

I spent about 10 minutes playing with the template stuff but it is kind of weak.

Does ReSharper do enhanced syntax coloring

Bert

I checked the options, and it appears that Resharper does not do any extended syntax highlighting. In fact I don't see any control over highlighting at all

I refactor by hand (changing templates, migrating changes to all databases through subversion, generating new code, test it, it's not very helpful to use refactoring tools).

However refactoring tools can be handy of course. Though I de-installed resharper (1.02) today, it was simply too slow, buggy (loss of color coding etc.)... It made vs.net look like a slow dog on my AMD 2600+ 1GB box, which is not what we need of course

They're working on it though, so perhaps I'll give it a try again soon...

Coderush was nice until I tested a project for a customer with over 500 tables (and thus a lot of classes). Scrolling a file was erm... well taking ages . Very weird.

Though I think it's MS fault ( ), the model to interact with vs.net is often not that great and a lot of performance is lost in the marshalling between COM and .NET and back...

Dave wrote:

I checked the options, and it appears that Resharper does not do any extended syntax highlighting. In fact I don't see any control over highlighting at all

Of course it does Just check the fonts and colors settings in vs.net, you'll have all kinds of resharper specific settings

Frans is right. I only checked the ReSharper specific menu/options and never looked at the VS font and color settings. There are some additional ReSharper settings within VS to change Font and Color settings for ReSharper. To be honest, I have never played with those setting in VS. I have always used the default.

Some people have mentioned a slowness with ReSharper, but quite frankly, I have never noticed it. In fact, I don't notice any slowness with ReSharper or CodeRush. I develop on an Intel P4 3GHz with 2GB of RAM, but I don't think it is really the machine. My projects are just not as large and complex as Frans' so I am quite happy with the performance.

And given my skills are not up to par with Frans, I can use all the add-in help I can get

Dave wrote:

Some people have mentioned a slowness with ReSharper, but quite frankly, I have never noticed it. In fact, I don't notice any slowness with ReSharper or CodeRush. I develop on an Intel P4 3GHz with 2GB of RAM, but I don't think it is really the machine. My projects are just not as large and complex as Frans' so I am quite happy with the performance.

My projects are much smaller than Frans' but my machine is similar and the speed suffered horribly under ReSharper for the months I suffered through using it. It was almost worth it, I just couldn't handle it anymore. When I put more RAM in this machine, I'll give it another shot.

Otis wrote:

I refactor by hand (changing templates, migrating changes to all databases through subversion, generating new code, test it, it's not very helpful to use refactoring tools).

However refactoring tools can be handy of course. Though I de-installed resharper (1.02) today, it was simply too slow, buggy (loss of color coding etc.)... It made vs.net look like a slow dog on my AMD 2600+ 1GB box, which is not what we need of course

We also tried the resharper - It killed my working enviroment - So i am Definitely not a fan of it - it slows my PC down to a crawl - I think it is dependant on the size of the project. The only thing that i liked about it was the realtime error detection (Dont need to compile to find if your code is going to compile). VB is ahead of C# is this aspect.

sirshannon wrote:

Dave wrote:

Some people have mentioned a slowness with ReSharper, but quite frankly, I have never noticed it. In fact, I don't notice any slowness with ReSharper or CodeRush. I develop on an Intel P4 3GHz with 2GB of RAM, but I don't think it is really the machine. My projects are just not as large and complex as Frans' so I am quite happy with the performance.

My projects are much smaller than Frans' but my machine is similar and the speed suffered horribly under ReSharper for the months I suffered through using it. It was almost worth it, I just couldn't handle it anymore. When I put more RAM in this machine, I'll give it another shot.

I mail with Oleg from jetbrains from time to time to get things fixed but I too couldn't handle it anymore, it was simply slowing down VS.NET. I don't mind if there are a few bugs, but what I do mind is that it is slowing down vs.net. If I load a solution it ALWAYS parses 3rd party assemblies again and again, even if it seems to cache things.

wayne wrote:

Otis wrote:

I refactor by hand (changing templates, migrating changes to all databases through subversion, generating new code, test it, it's not very helpful to use refactoring tools).

However refactoring tools can be handy of course. Though I de-installed resharper (1.02) today, it was simply too slow, buggy (loss of color coding etc.)... It made vs.net look like a slow dog on my AMD 2600+ 1GB box, which is not what we need of course

We also tried the resharper - It killed my working enviroment - So i am Definitely not a fan of it - it slows my PC down to a crawl - I think it is dependant on the size of the project.

This I had as well, it seems to be fixed in 1.02, which is currently downloadable. (the slowdown that is, not killing your working environment, which is related to the crappyness of vs.net)

The only thing that i liked about it was the realtime error detection (Dont need to compile to find if your code is going to compile). VB is ahead of C# is this aspect.

I liked that too. VB.NET is not ahead of C# in this, VB.NET compiles the code behind the scenes. This has advantages in small projects, but is a real pain in big projects.

VB.NET is not ahead of C# in this, VB.NET compiles the code behind the scenes.

Still a very nice feature in VB.Net - i would love to have an equivalent for C#...

wayne wrote:

VB.NET is not ahead of C# in this, VB.NET compiles the code behind the scenes.

Still a very nice feature in VB.Net - i would love to have an equivalent for C#...

No you won't. At least, not an intensive one. It does make the editor sloppier. It's no surprise VB.NET's intellisense is severily slower than C#'s.

VB.NET compiles the code behind the scenes

I don't know if i am right - but it feels like it does not do the compile in the background if you build by yourself every now and again. - But i have had the experience where VB.net goes of on its own mission (Background Compiling) leaving me waiting for it.

How does the resharper do it? background build?

wayne wrote:

How does the resharper do it? background build?

It scans the files. THey had it implemented pretty bad so it was very slow on files which were big. It now isn't slow anymore, but it re-scans the files after every project compile in a solution compile... So in a build of llblgen pro, which contains of 11 projects, it rescans every file op in the editor 11 times... wonderful software