Jay Kimble

[As previously mentioned I have committed to switching from ReSharper (R#) to CR/R!... the end result will be a regular guy’s comparison of the 2.  DISCLAIMER: By no means is this meant to be a slight on R#, but more of me looking at CR/R! a little closer -- I think a number of us took a cursory look at CR/R! and while we found value a surface look doesn’t really give you the full picture... I’m going through the challenges of using CR/R! because it IS different from R# and hopefully I can help folks who are trying to compare between the two and decide which is best for their situation]

Turning the corner (sort of)

Tuesday I turned the corner I thought that there was no coming back (more on that in a second). The thing about CR/R! is that it’s truly a learning experience. CR takes over your environment in such a way that, while it still looks like Visual Studio, you need to re-educate yourself a little to all its nuances. It can actually get in your way (and there have been a couple times with Mark and Rory (and Koen HanHoefkens, the author of the excellent --and free-- CR_Resolve plugin) where I have asked "how do I turn xxx feature off." The most annoying one for me is that I tend to highlight code and start to overwrite with new code... for the most part there are no pains here, except when the character you type is a "(" which is often the character I am typing when changing an "if" statement. What happens is that this embeds your selection in a set of parenthesis.  This was actually easy to turn off... the feature is called "embeddings" which is found in the shortcuts section of the options (there are lots of options with CR/R!). Before I shut them all down I discovered some really rich stuff here... for instance you can highlight code, type "c" and your code is instantly surrounded by a try catch with your cursor setting in the catch block. I still turned off the parenthesis, but I left the rest of them on.

I’ve also started figuring out some of the templates.

I’m still learning here, but the topic is very deep!

BTW, I’ve found that this product enhances your experience while working with ASP.NET HTML, JavaScript, VB, C#, and even Script# (C# variant that creates JS files).

My One hiccup

I have experienced one hiccup over the last several days: PERFORMANCE/MEMORY FOOTPRINT. I’ve had VS crash a few times. I finally think I have the problem figured out (a not so well behaved plug-in I installed... I installed some really old plugins... well they didn’t seem that old).

Currently the only DXCore plugins I have running (besides CR/R!) are CR_RESOLVE, and the "Highlight Current Line" both from the community plugins (mentioned in the last post). I also have turned off the Code Analysis (temporarily).

I am still watching this closely (and am sure that Mark Miller will chime in either personally or publicly with a few more suggestions, but I don’t think he needs to... this lesson should be heeded that you need to be careful which addins you install in VS... they can make things run less than smoothly, and adding a bunch of them all at once makes it even harder to determine where the problem really lies).