Resharper has been makingits way through my team like a virus. I’ve been using it for a couple ofmonths now, and I think I can say I’m sold. Ironically, it was Whidbeythat caused me to really latch on to Resharper. I sort of got addicted to theIDE enhancements in Whidbey and felt very naked when switching back to VS2003. Resharperis the one thing that still allows me to use VS2003 and not feel completelydisappointed.
Thereare many cool features that make Resharper worth it: advancedsyntax highlighting, refactoring,Intellisenseadd-ons, the usual stuff that’s talked about when IDE addons arediscussed. However, there are a couple things that I find particularlycompelling. First, the syntax highlighter crawls your XML documentation lookingfor invalid “see cref=” and “param name=” tags. Normally,these won’t be caught until compile time, and even when they do it can behard to locate the source of the error. Resharper highlights mistake in brightread, so you can easily see what XML doc elements are in error. This has provento be a real timesaver for me.
The other feature I really like is CodeReformatting. Everyone has their own style when it comes to formattingcode. For instance, I’m inclined to write void Foo( int bar ), whileothers on my team write void Foo(int bar). I don’t know about you, butthese little stylistic things are practically hardwired into me – I don’tconsciously think about them, they just happen. Since everyone tends to have stylisticinstinct that are *just slightly different* than everyone else’s,you can end up with a code base that is formatted inconsistently. Not a hugedeal if you’re only shipping binaries, but in our case the source code isa primary deliverable and we want it to look nice and consistent. Rather thanforcing everyone to change their style to conform to a standard, we justconfigure a default set of Resharper formatting rules and periodically run themon the whole solution. It’s proven to be a big win because it removesdistractions, keeps our code looking nice, and doesn’t require anyone tochange their own hardwired formatting rules.
Resharper’sgood stuff. Go download it and check it out if you haven’t already.
