Ivan Mitev In The Software Trenches

Technology weblog on .NET development and other things that make the world go round

May 18, 2006

VS.NET Productivity Add-Ins Revisited

I posted some links to VS.NET 2003 productivity add-ins a while ago and now I need to catch up.

ReSharper has continued to be my tool of choice and I have become quite profficient using its numerous features. Well, it is not perfect - its memory consumption is high and some operations are really slow, but it makes my coding very hassle-free.

I found that Visual Assist X is a good complement to ReSharper. The nice things about it are that it has great intellisense (fast and powerful, though a bit hard to get accustomed to), it offers spellcheck, and supports not just C#, but C++ and VB.NET too. Its requirements are not heavy, so it is great for big solutions. The syntax coloring is also interesting, though I have get used to ReSharper's way. The dark side is that sometimes VisualAssist gets unstable and misbehaves, but such are the risks of the trade.

I just saw that JustCode has released a new version 1.1. The feature comparison between it, ReSharper and CodeRush looks very promising and it makes me think that Resharper could have been even better. I had given a look at the Omicore IDE (X-develop) a few months ago and it made good first look impression, though it had a few rough edges. So JustCode might be worth a try. I don't think that it would be reasonable for me to try to replace ReSharper, but if JustCode is faster and reliable, I might be converted.

I notice that the number of refactoring add-ins increase with CodeIt.Once. After seeing a few screenshots in the documentation area, I cannot say that I am not hooked up. It has some nice wizards, that might be very helpful for those who are not quite familiar with refactoring practices. In the comments section I added a few more comments after I tried it for real.

Visual Sidekick has recently released a new version but it is all about navigation, and there Visual Assist X offers similar features like Symbol Search, so I am not really despearte about such a tool.

UPDATE: I did a quick review on JustCode in a new post and in CodeIt.Once in the comments section. Both seem to be good products, especially if you are not coding just in C#, but I will stick to ReSharper for now.

posted by Ivan Mitev @ 00:14

2 Comments:

Hi Ivan,

I just wanted to mention that CodeIt.Once the Wizard-like interface you mentioned that is good for beginner users as well as the alternative for the power users.

I would encourage you to download and try CodeIt.Once (it won't cost you anything) as screenshots are not the best way to get opinion about a product.

I will be happy to answer any questions you may have and hear feedback.

Best,
Serge B.

By Anonymous Serge Baranovsky, at 24 May, 2006 03:20  

I tried CodeIt.Once and I really liked some things about it. The Preview of the changes is a very nice feature and the wizards are optional so one get turn them off when he has become profficient.The speed of the refactorings is also good, though I have not tried it on very big solution

There are some things that I don't understand and I found some minor bugs:
It is not clear how CodeIt.Once Undo/Redo is different from the VS.NET default Undo/Redo. When you use them both at the same time you might get some strange intermediate results.
I had some namespace change refactoring not take an account the existence of a partial class.
When extracting a method and telling it to be static, it does create methods arguments for the fields used, so the result won't compile.

By Blogger Ivan Mitev, at 24 May, 2006 10:35  

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