This is just a post to gripe and commiserate with each other.
Everybody knows that Superman is nearly crippled by the presence of Kryptonite. What we might forget is that Superman’s powers are derived from exposure to the yellow sun of Earth. Why is this relevant? Simple. When I’m using VS2008 I feel like I’ve lost my coding superpowers because ReSharper is more or less knocked out. Turn ReSharper on and you get false alarm squiggles everywhere that drive me absolutely batty. Then you turn off code analysis and switch the Intellisense back to VS mode. Now your Intellisense stinks and a bunch of other ReSharper features stop working (I’ve turned the code analysis back on).
Anyway, the end result for me is that VS2008 today, even with the new spiffy language features, is not as productive as VS2005.
One of my favorite quotes from a recent ALT.NET gathering was “Visual Studio is just a nice environment to host ReSharper.” I want to draft a resolution from the community. As of right now, I want Microsoft and JetBrains to coordinate release schedules so that we never have this gap in ReSharper coverage. It’s like changing jobs and having a gap in health insurance. I don’t care who’s to blame or needs to shape up or coordinate with the other or what, I just want the tooling to be released in lockstep. Or make VS out of the box support many, many more features from ReSharper to make it be the methadone to ReSharper’s heroin.
Just to forestall Mike Moore from making fun of me for my ReSharper addition — We’re building a system in .Net with a mainstream (i.e. static typed) language, and those languages are only palatable with a huge dose of JetBrains-fueled goodness.
As a side note. I’ve recently heard a couple conference/user group tour speakers say that they don’t use any type of automated refactoring tool for one reason or another. Fair or not, when I see somebody get up to present on coding or technology specific topics, and they don’t have an automated refactoring tool in their Visual Studio, I automatically think that there’s no way this person has any real hands on experience with this stuff in a production environment.