It’s funny to see the universal love of ReSharper that’s in the .NET blogosphere. This strikes me as Sam Gentile has his come-to-Jesus moment with the tool. That kind of made me take note because a) it’s Sam and b) I had the very same experience of starting with CodeRush and Refactor!
Don’t get me wrong I really, really liked the DevExpress tools, they have a lot going for them in terms of UI slickness and the template features are much nicer. Still, I’ve become a ReSharper fan boy.
I heard Aaron and Jacob talking about running both tools and that it took some doing and that they’re also running viemu. These facts, taken in sum, lead me to believe they’re some sort of programming mutants: Exhibit A. I, personally, had to give up on viemu after a week or so. I was never a vi/vim guy but feel like it could boost me up if I just stuck with it.
The (first) hook for me was the source formatting feature (CTRL+ALT+F). What’s nice is that you can setup a whole bunch of rules indicating how you want your code formatted and hit a keystroke and damned if your code doesn’t become the hotness. What struck me is that this feature embeds the XP practice (and general all around good idea) of the code standard (at least the format part of it). More interesting to me is the idea of eventually pushing these values deeper into the tool stack: into languages. Python, for example, enforces a kind of standard through it’s syntactic uniformity and “one way to do it” philosophy.
All of this ReSharper talk makes me want to find some new tricks on my cheat sheet to drill on. I have the sheet pasted under one of my desktop monitors and every day I try to pick up one or two items to focus and drill on. Ilya Ryzhenkov of ReSharper blogs (thanks for bringing this to my attention Maruis) so there’s another way to get a periodic reminder of the depths of the tool. Repetition is key with all of these “knowledge in the head” things.
Still not convinced? Check out this video. Nothing screams developer like the Hackers soundtrack.
2 Comments
One of my favourite keystrokes for cleaning up a codebase is ALT-Delete - Safe Delete. If the method/property/variable isn’t used, ReSharper deletes it. If it is used, it shows you the usages dialog so you can track things down. Great for those codebases you inherit where half the code doesn’t look like it’s used. (Like we’ve never had that happen to us.) Honestly there’s tons of great stuff in ReSharper and the more you use it, the faster and more proficient you get.
Some day I’m going to do a video on vim and its power… you’re right though, you really do need to stick with it in order to get any benefit from it. The learning curve is more like a steep cliff with some overhangs than a… curve. That said, I do need to learn more resharper and coderush shortcuts, though the context sensitivity is pretty good on its own. I mainly use 3 keys, coderush refactor this, resharper refactor this, and resharper quick fixes (alt+enter).
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