This is probably just a bit of preaching to the choir, but...
I'm bringing up the rear on .Net 2.0 adoption. When VS2005 came out my feeling was that VS2003 + ReSharper would still be superior to VS2005 in terms of coding productivity. After about 2 days of pairing on VS2005 with workstations that didn't have ReSharper I've decided that I was absolutely right. Minus ReSharper, I still think VS2005 is clunky to use and feature poor. Yeah, I know they added the Class Designer and tons more wizardy code generation things, but I don't care. I want stuff that makes coding easier and faster.
I've got the rest of the team talked into at least trying out ReSharper. A friend of mine asked me several months ago why you would want ReSharper on top of VS2005 and I didn't give a strong enough reason. After a couple days of working with naked Visual Studio, here's a couple of little reasons why you want to use ReSharper that add up to significant time savings:
- ReSharper shows syntax and compilation problems in real time by highlighting errors. With VS2005 you have to compile to get those indications. Am I being forgetful, or didn't VS2003 do that?
- Adding "using" statements automatically. Both from typing a class name and from the "CTRL-ALT-SPACE" statement completion. That's been driving me batty doing that manually.
- Suggesting variable names
- The "surround with" shortcuts to surround a section of code with if/then statements or try/catch constructs
- The refactoring support. VS2005 has the bare minimum Extract Method and Rename refactorings, but doesn't go far enough. ReSharper adds better refactorings for changing a methods signature, extracting abstract classes, and moving methods from subclasses to superclasses and vice versa.
- Finding types by the "CTRL-N" shortcut
- Code navigation shortcuts
- The little codegen tools to create getters, setters, and constructors
- ReSharper generates Equals() and GetHashCode() methods from the fields in a class. It's a really sweet feature for unit testing
All in all, taking advantage of ReSharper (or your refactoring tool of choice) cuts down on the mechanical costs of writing code and goes a long, long way towards making evolutionary design techniques cost effective. The bottom line is less time typing and more time to spend on design and thinking.
On the positive side, I haven't seen any of the stability problems that seemed to plague the early adopters of VS2005 (other than debugging). I haven't seen any sluggishness either, but that might be my new dual core machine with 2GB of RAM.