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ReSharper 4 in 2 weeks (and random geekiness)

Posted by Jeremy Miller on February 1, 2008

From the source. 

It’s only been a couple weeks of clumsiness with VS2008.  Nowhere as bad as these waits:

  • The Lost season premiere last night
  • Return of the Jedi as a 9 year old
  • The neverending wait for A Memory of Light
  • George R. R. Martin’s next book (didn’t he say he was basically almost done when he published the last one?)
  • Stephen King to write another Dark Tower book
  • Waiting for football season to start after the end of the NCAA tournament (not a baseball fan)
  • Last day of school
  • IronRuby to be usable for production code

 

 

 

About Jeremy Miller

Jeremy is the Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap tool for Dependency Injection with .Net, StoryTeller for supercharged acceptance testing in .Net, and one of the principal developers behind FubuMVC. Jeremy's thoughts on all things software can be found at The Shade Tree Developer at http://codebetter.com/jeremymiller.
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  • http://davesquared.blogspot.com Dave^2

    Looks like they might be ditching the Feb 15 release of the EAP in favour of nightly builds. Better than nothing I guess.
    http://www.intellij.net/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=5207181&tstart=0#5207181

  • http://weblogs.asp.net/gbarnett Granville Barnett

    Not a massive R# fan but it looks like from here – http://intellij.net/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=272878 that the EAP release will be rolled out tommorow (15th Feb).

    I think…

  • http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller Jeremy D. Miller

    Because Duke Nuk’em Forever is a myth. I’m afraid that the days when I agonized over video cards to play the latest games is long over for me.

  • Francesco Rizzi

    (amazing.. you didn’t mention Duke Nuk’em Forever among things that are taking too long time…)

  • http://unhandledexceptions.spaces.live.com Steve Bohlen

    Jeremy:

    Good point re: the learning curve; that’s definitely a non-trivial issue (as I will similarly admit that when I first picked up CodeRush it was non-trivial to become actually productive with it). But the time-span that you would have had available to you to overcome this curve would really have been the 2.5 mos from end-nov-2007 (the VS2008 release) to mid-feb-2008 (JetBrains’ projected release-date for R#4) and that’s more than enough to have made the change 😀

    I too have often wondered about the JetBrains focus on Java tooling being either a drag (or at least a distraction) in their support/release/feature-development for R# — its interesting that you mention its possible coupling of code/release with IntelliJ; I hadn’t considered that but it does make a lot of sense on a number of levels.

    I also think (personal opinion here) it may be why R# has a less-integrated-with-the-VS-IDE feel to it whereas CodeRush + RefactorPro have a much tighter integration re: user input, user feedback, etc. (most notably in the number of refactorings for which R# wants to make me step thru a series of modal dialogs and RefactorPro wants to show me the preview of my choices right within the code editor window).

    In addition to familiarity with one tool vs. the other, this also represents a personal preference about how much you want to ‘feel’ that your add-on is a ‘natural extension’ of the VS IDE experience vs. clearly a separate piece of software you are launching when you want to do a refactoring. I am a former R# user that made the switch when I changed jobs a while back and in general there is really very little that the two don’t both do quite well but they definitely come at the problem of ‘tooling experience’ from two very different places.

    Happy coding and keep up the great posts; this is one of my regular reads since I find it full of excellent real-world content~!

    -Steve B.

  • http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller Jeremy D. Miller

    @Steve,

    Yes and no. I’m unhappy about R# always lagging the VS release, but it would take much longer than the two weeks I need to wait to retrain myself to use another tool.

    The release cycle that DevExpress has with VS is very attractive, but R# fits my development style far better than Refactor!. I’d rather wait to be honest.

    I do wonder if some of this is because JetBrains is primarily a Java shop and either doesn’t have the same relationship with MS, or just isn’t as focused on the MS world. I know they actually share a lot of code somehow with IntelliJ.

  • http://unhandledexceptions.spaces.live.com Steve Bohlen

    Maybe you should consider an alternate add-in to R# if you’re sad about its slow release schedule; the guys @ developer express had a VS2008-compatible version of CodeRush + RefactorPro! (released products, not beta) ready right alongside VS2008 at its MSDN-subscriber RTM date (end nov-2007).

    Not to start a religious war over which product is better (because I used to use R# and found R# a quite useful tool), but DevExpress’ tight cooperation with Microsoft has enabled them to provide (right out of the gate) refactoring support for not only the new platform (VS2008) but all the C#3.0/VB9 language features too (oh, and did I mention their tool supports refactorings for JAVASCRIPT in the VS2008 javascript editor too? — unbelievably clever!).

    While you R# guys have been stuck in VS2005 waiting for JetBrains to get around to releasing something that works in VS2008, I’ve been developing (with full add-in tooling support) in the new IDE with the new language features for over two months already :)

    I’m sure you’re invested in your R# license, but if you’re impatient to get productive in the new platform it might be worth a look @ an alternate that’s better sync-ed to the VS release cycle!

  • http://rabdullin.com Rinat Abdullin

    Jeremy,

    Well, you are not turning all R# IntelliSense off after all, just the primary one. So Ctrl+Space gives you the IS by VS with extension methods, and other features of the C# 3.5, while Ctrl+Alt+Space and Ctrl+Shift+Space keep bringing up the autocompletion of R#. Code analysis still works on case-by-case basis (although the solution-wide scan has to be shut down).

    So VS 2008 with R# is still more productive than pure VS 2008 for me.

  • http://blodgettm.blogspot.com Matt Blodgett

    Man, I tried using IronRuby for the first time today, and it was _painful_. I had very high hopes that were quickly dashed as I realized the most basic things were not implemented.

    Not to mention the complete lack of designer support, which alone makes it unusable for real projects.

    Right now it feels like it’s going to be an eternity before IronRuby is production-ready.

  • http://www.geekswithblogs.net/robz Robz

    Ah yes, the Dark Tower – my favorite series. The only book series that I started in high school and finally reading the final book that came out last year-ish (Sep 2006). Not to mention that the series has been around as long as Stephen King has been writing books.

    I’m purposely reading the last book slowly. 😀

  • sergiopereira

    This is nothing compared to my suffering in between soccer word cups :)

  • http://blogger.forgottenskies.com Steve Gentile

    Good list – Sounds like you have your priorities right :)

  • http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller Jeremy D. Miller

    @David,

    I went and peeked at his blog today. He’s saying it’ll be out this year. There’s a sample chapter up from Jon Snow’s POV.

  • http://www.mohundro.com/blog/ David Mohundro

    I’m actually not minding the wait on Martin’s next book… at least right now. I haven’t even finished the second Ice and Fire book :) It will probably be awful when I actually finish the fourth, though.

  • http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller Jeremy D. Miller

    @Rinat,

    I know about the Ctrl-8 trick and that kind of helps, but then you miss out on the continuous compilation. Turning off R# intellisense is hurtful because it’s so much better than VS out of the box.

  • http://rabdullin.com Rinat Abdullin

    R# is still usable with VS 2008. Ctrl+8, minor formatting tweaks and a primary R# IntelliSense turned off make the life better.

    And this situation has surely forced me to learn new tricks and R# shortcuts with it.

  • http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller Jeremy D. Miller

    Don’t get my hopes up too much!

  • http://stevenharman.net Steven Harman

    We were talking to the ReSharper PM yesterday in the #alt.net channel and he said to keep your eyes open for Nightly builds… they might just magically start appearing as early as Monday. :)