[Disclaimer: Before I start this series I want you all to know that I love Resharper! It has made me a better developer, and if you pay attention you will see why I think that. At the same time I love Dev Express. As a company they are constantly giving back to the community. While I’m not a fan of Mark Miller’s humor, their addin framework is about the best you will find IMO... and Scott Hanselman (ScottHa from here on) loves CodeRush/Refactor. I love ScottHa; he has shown me all kinds of cools utility that I couldn’t live without... he is angelic... I went looking for a halo for his picture... nahh been done <grin />. Anyway, this article series I hope will do a good job of comparing and contrasting the 2 VS2008 IDE adds in their current forms (which CR is at 3.0.8 and R# is at 4.0)... and this is really from my personal perspective on what I use]
I’ve been using R# for quite awhile and honestly I have felt that it made me a better developer. I know I’m not a TDD guy, but there are so many goodies in it that I just simply loved it. BUT, my license ran out. I was in a debate about what I was going to do.
As it turns out (late) last year, I was given a license to CodeRush/Refactor Pro. I had been intrigued by their lengthy list of Refactoring and how they were doing ASP.NET refactorings. Well, about that time the betas of R# started happpening and personally I was going through the collapse of my business (and the amount of development I was doing dwindled, so honestly I did the bad thing and forgot to blog about it.
Like I said my R# ran out, but I remembered that I had CR/RFP, so I decided to re-install it and look around (and really look around), so for the next 30 days I will be exclusively using CR/RFP and will be looking to see how it compares to the features of R# that I actually use (you might use other things), and will of course be blogging about it.
The number 1 feature of R# that I use is it’s code analysis I love being able to look at my C# code and at a glance am able to tell if there are issues with the code at a glance. I have actually learned things from the suggestions it gives me... so I can’t live without that.
Guess what, I remembered reading a veiled reference to CR’s Code Analysis on Dave Hayden’s blog. It’s off by default, so if you are playing with CR... here’s how to turn it on. Bring up the DevExpress menu’s options, turn on Expert mode (I think you need that), and type "Code Issues" in the Search Text box. Check the enabled check box when the Code Issues options appears and Viola! You now have analysis on your code.
My initial knee jerk reaction is that the Code Analysis is almost as good as R# (almost), but then sometimes R# recommends things that I’m not really interested in doing (I know you can tweak it’s suggestions).
On the other hand, CR doesn’t seem to bog down the environment for me!
So take your pick... CR has come a long way from when I last used it. It used to have some annoying "features" that seemed to have been tuned. (their auto-complete used to annoy me/get in my way... I would say that it neither gets in my way nor annoys me)
Print | posted on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 9:09 AM