Jay Kimble

[UPDATE 8/5: Rory noticed a couple spelling errors in people's names and also noted that I should give Koen HanHoefkens credit for his excellent CR_RESOLVE plugin]

I have survived my first week with CodeRush/Refactor Pro (CR/RP). I have discovered a few things about my development habits:

• I don’t memorize all that many shortcut keystrokes... I tend to look for the "one keystroke to rule them all." Interestingly enough I avoid mouse usage as well
• With the competing produce (R#) I use about 7 features:
  • Improved Intellisense
  • Rename Refactoring (which is also available in VS)
  • Extract Method (also available in VS)
  • Code Analysis
  • Auto-create add using/import
  • File Templates
  • Find Usages

I’m also discovering some things about CR/RP

• I’m discovering that I need to tweak CR/RP’s default settings to avoid some of the "annoyances" (CR/RP can take over at times when you don’t want it to)
• I think If I can get over the hump I am going to find that I’m MORE productive with this thing (although it has been touch and go at times)
• One of my machines seems to run faster than R# and the other not so much (there are different things turned on/off on these machines right now)
• RP provides more refactorings than any other product I have seen!! They even have refactorings for ASP.NET .ASPX files (the html part!!!)

So the "one keystroke to rule them all" for CR/RP is CTL + ~ . Oh yeah, you also need to install the community DXCore addin called -- Refactor_Resolve (which was written by Koen HanHoefkens and you can get from here.. but I would recommend that you get it out of the zip file found here. BTW, thank you Rory Becker for this info). Once you have installed that and get it turned on then Refactor! will give you an option to add usings/imports for your unresolved references.

Oh yeah that community project has a number of nice things you may want to install... like the highlighted line focus.

As I mentioned before you also need to turn on Code Analysis and cut down the size of the little bar at the bottom of the code files, by setting it to 1 file and 0 pixels (it will still show up, but it won’t be as intrusive... your scroll bar will work again). One more thing I believe this feature is a new one (and maybe even a beta one)... it’s not as good as R#'s but from what I understand with their plans it is going to get a lot better (they are going to add over 100 items it can check for and find...)

Additional things I did was I turned off the Smart Brackets and Smart Parentheses and the some of the Smart Paste features features (the auto create properties ones are what I killed... I may kill a few more of the Smart Paste features to get things tweaked out a little better for me).

Summary
All in all things are getting better... Today was a breakthrough day for me (Thank you Rory Becker and Mark Miller)! I think I turned the corner on my experience. I’m think I’m as productive with CR/RP now as I was with R#. I’m only missing 2 things... both of which are livable right now: Find Usages (which I can use the Find References mechanism), and R# File Templates (but CR’s templates are WAY better... so I need to learn a few more of those... I have a number committed to memory already). Just 23 more days to go... but I suspect I'm going to be very comfy before that happens.