.Net Jonesie - Resharper Love Hate

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Resharper is great. It includes so many neat tools and shortcuts that it really is hard to argue that it's the best Visual Studio productivity tool available today.

So - why do I hate it so much?

1: A lot of the tools are better versions of the standard Visual Studio versions - refactoring, templates/snippets etc. I find the VS versions good enough.

2: There's 3 pages of keyboard short cuts to remember if you want to use Resharper effectively. I have enough trouble remembering Ctrl+C to copy.

3: It's sooooo f-ing slow! VS runs like a complete dog when Resharper is installed. All those productivity gains are pointless if you are waiting for VS to respond.

4: It's noisy. I like VS clean and simple. I dont like all the Reshaper crap over the screen interfering with my train of thought.

5: It's a little buggy - well, I cant say this for sure, but I think it suffers from trying to be too clever and sometimes it gets things wrong, especially with ASP.Net tags.

So, this time I managed to keep it on my machine for 3 days before removing it. I'll try it again in another couple of versions.

Sunday, April 01, 2007 10:15:26 AM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

Comments [1] |

Monday, April 02, 2007 9:33:17 AM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

As an avid Resharper fan I have to counter your comments:
1. VS versions are the Microsofted versions (you know, borrow the concept but nerf it enough that the originators
won't complain) of the Resharper tools.
2. All you need to remember is Alt+Ins (insert code - property, constructor, etc), Alt+Enter (accept Resharper
suggestion - usings, create method property etc) and Ctrl+Alt+F (cleanup code), with those 3 I have found a
noticable increase in productivity, especially when writing a lot of domain code / unit tests. The little green
box is also a great gauge at a glance of code quality.
3. It's slow because you probably have the default anti-virus setup, resharper does a lot of file scanning and
the AV software Intergen use acts as a nice bottleneck between the disk and anything (I disabled my AV software).
4. Valid concern, but how does it differ from those little squiggles that Word uses to indicate a problem. If
you have a better approach, email the JetBrains guys, I am sure they'd appreciate the feedback :)
5. Resharper and ASP.NET is just plain ugly. I have managed to avoid a lot of web development with Resharper
so I guess I've just been lucky.

I think the biggest thing about using Resharper is accepting that you will have to alter the way you use the IDE
some, I now write the code I want from the API in rather than from implementation out and Resharper is a great tool
that allows you to work in this fashion without a lot of pain.

Here's hoping you can feel the Resharper love (without the pain) some day soon =D

Neal Blomfield

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