Resharper
Ok, so I know the blog-o-sphere is covered with these kinds of posts, but I just had to say how amazed I am with ReSharper. It’s amazing! In a way it’s not really amazing at how much ReSharper does, it’s more amazing how much Visual Studio doesn’t do. It’s ridiculous.
Maybe it’s because I was born and raised on Eclipse, but I expect my IDE to do a lot for me. Code generation, refactoring, file renaming, unit tests: i want it all. Visual Studio does… not much. I finally got it running on my Vista box this morning (a pain), and I was shocked at how little Visual Studio let me do. I was talking to Tom and Shey while was getting my development environment setup, and the conversation pretty much went like this?
James: Can I do this?
Shey: No.
Tom: Get ReSharper.
James: What about this?
Shey: No.
Tom: Get ReSharper.
I’m sure you can see where this is going. I’ve been kind of paying attention to dialogs as I coded through the day (I started an open source project I hope to release soon so I could get back in the C# groove), and almost all the ones that are actually useful have the ReSharper icon in the upper left (good marketing btw).
In short, as far as I am concerned, Visual Studio without ReSharper is pretty much worthless.
PS- In my sickest most depraved daydreams I envision coding C# inside Eclipse with all it’s goodness. Actually, that desire reduced significantly as the day progressed (post-ReSharper installation), but I still think it’d be neat.
BTW- ReSharper won’t find your unit tests if your class isn’t explicitly marked public. It doesn’t give very helpful warnings to that effect either. Just so you know. It just says, “No unit tests found in file”. It makes sense, but neither Tom nor I caught it at first.
BTW2- No static members in interface declarations in C#? Seriously? I must be trying to do things the Java Way. I have ILoggerFactory, which SimpleLoggerFactory implements. Currently I have to instantiate SimpleLoggerFactory then call simpleLoggerFactory.GetLogger(this.GetType()). Any suggestions?
