Could You Go Back To Coding Without Resharper?

37 commentsWritten on August 31st, 2009 by
Categories: Opinions

As most of you know by now, i'm a pretty big fan of Resharper. I've been using it for about 2 years now, and i really can't picture myself anymore writing code in Visual Studio without it. I'm definitely not the biggest Resharper keyboard-shortcut Jedi, but i make use of the shortcuts a lot. A hell of a lot actually. Having to go back to plain old Visual Studio without Resharper would seriously mess me up.... a lot.

At work, most of my coworkers started using Resharper as well since about a year ago. Now, almost every time i happen to sit by a coworker or just observe someone writing code, i can see them using shortcuts that i didn't even know about, or using a lot of live templates (which i really should start using as well) that they created. I know that some of them simply wouldn't want to go back to working without it either.

So what about you guys? Have you tried Resharper and if so, would you be able to go back to not using it? If you did go back to not using it, did you replace it with another tool (like Coderush or something else)? If you do still use it, which features do you like the most? Which ones make you the most productive?

Btw, i'm not getting paid by JetBrains for this, but i'm genuinely interested in hearing about this from you guys so speak up! :)

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 23:06 and is filed under Opinions. You can subscribe to any comments to this entry via RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Eddie Velasquez

    Two words: hell no!

  • Mike

    I could, but I sure don’t want to. I think the ctrl-e & ctrl-n buttons on my keyboard almost have all the ink taken off…

  • http://defragdev.com/blog/ Mark

    I’ve noticed exactly the same thing. We got a load of licenses at work after someone heard a good buzz about it at a conference. Once people see past the fact that it’s NOT a squiggly line generator and I show them what is possible with it (code refactoring, navigation, generation, correction, transforms between delegates and lambdas etc.), I’ve never seen anyone uninstall it. It’s a tremendous bit of software.

    I haven’t tried coderush, but R# is the bee’s knees.

  • http://kevinswiber.com Kevin Swiber

    I tried this briefly. As it turns out, I must be a masochist.

    I can do so much more so much faster with R#. Alt-Enter, Enter. I’m doing that day-in and day-out. I use the test runner. I’m all over that Find Usages window. Go to implementation, go to inheritor, Code Clean-up, Extract Method, Change Method Signature, Live Templates, etc. I use the refactorings constantly. Set all the options to fit my style, and I’ve been good to go ever since. Aside from the occasional OutOfMemoryException, I’ve had nothing but a great experience.

    I’ve only been using it for a little less than a year, but I’m totally hooked.

  • Kris-I

    Me it’s CodeRush, impossible to code anymore without :)

    @Mark, I uninstalled R# ;-)

  • John Simons

    Paraphrasing here.
    Visual Studio the thing I use to host Resharper in ;)

  • Jonas

    I would never go back!
    One of my colleagues asked me if I could write a list with the shortcuts I use on a regular, day to day basis and I said: sure I can write down the once I’ve used so far today, should be around something like 6 to 8. When I then sat and wrote the list directly after lunch I ended up with 27 shortcuts. =)

  • marc

    I’m with Kris-I – my company tried to force R# on me, but I could never get the hang of it, never get used to it. It just gets in my way too many times, I have to travel large distances with the mouse to click on an icon at the border of my screen too many times.

    CodeRush on the other hand is much better that way – things happen right where my cursor and thus my eyes are focused – without interrupting my workflow and thought process.

    Could I code without R# – HELL YES! I need CodeRush!

  • ibrahim

    I am using ReSharper everyday and cannot do anything without it, but after having worked on the same project more than 2 years, I have noticed that I still don’t even know in which file the most basic classes are. They are all under Ctrl+T for me.

  • Örjan

    Resharper all the way, it makes VS to behave a little bit as Intellij and Intellij is so much better than VS.

    http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/WI/Web+IDE+EAP –>
    JetBrains does not currently have any plans to work on a standalone IDE for the .NET platform.

    But I’m still waiting for IntelliNET IDEA

  • http://www.learnaholic.me Kornelije

    R# actually, with its remarks, made me a better programmer. It made my sometimes dumb code into nice, elegant and clever one, and thought me how to develop better!

  • Carel Lotz

    I’m a confessed R# addict, but I must admit that I still sometimes get frustrated with the performance penalty it imposes on me – even with the latestt v4.5 release. I won’t uninstall though :-)

  • http://dirkdev.blogspot.com Dirk

    I’m also addicted to R# and I don’t want to repeat all the advantages from above.
    And… NO, I can’t code in pure Visual Studio any more. I tried last week on a fellows machine and it was so painful!

    But I realized that I am really addicted when pressing ALT-Enter in MSWord because of the red spelling squiggles ;-)

  • http://ellisweb.net Yaakov

    Ironically, when this post came through my RSS reader, it had an ad for Visual Assist X inserted at the bottom.

  • Jonas

    I’m with Kris-I – my company tried to force R# on me, but I could never get the hang of it, never get used to it. It just gets in my way too many times, I have to travel large distances with the mouse to click on an icon at the border of my screen too many times.
    Then I would say you are using it wrong. The real benefit of using a tool like resharper is gained when you don’t use the mouse at all. I can go through an entire day of coding without ever touching the mouse and I encourage you to do the same.

  • http://www.ercueser.com Ercu

    I know that R# is a must tool, but i try to avoid using it. Two reasons: I don’t want to feel naked and imcompenent when i’m unable to use it (on the client’s computer or when it’s trial time ended), and it’s price.

  • http://www.filip.duyck.org efdee

    Programming in Visual Studio without Resharper is like writing a novel on a typewriter. Without correction lint. And it’s one of those old typewriters that lock up when you accidentally hit two keys at the same time.

  • Harry

    I am the only developer in my company using Resharper. It becomes a pain every time I need to help another person and using the person’s bare environment. I am trying to convince my boss to give everyone a Resharper license. …

  • Harry

    To Ercu,
    I think the price is not that bad at all … free would be better … but compare to what developers are making …. I think it is reasonable. I cannot imagine carpenters without proper tools (though they are expensive for a lot of people).

  • Mike

    Not a chance. Seriously, I’ve become addicted to some of the features.

  • http://defragdev.com/blog/ Mark

    As someone else said, the real power of R# is in its shortcuts. I’m not saying that extensive use of shortcuts is the only way to go in an addin (as someone else said Coderush uses the mouse to good effect), but with R#, once you learn the shortcuts you barely touch the mouse.

    The only time I touch the mouse now is when navigating code using ctrl-click and debugging. When I’m programming, I’m pretty much 100% keyboard navigation + shortcuts now.

  • http://blog.dynamicprogrammer.com Hernan Garcia

    No, specially for the refactorings. Either Resharper or CodeRush but no barebones VS. I’m playing with VS 2010 and even when they have some nice features added, like generate from usage, I’m still missing Resharper.

  • http://www.aaron-powell.com Aaron Powell

    I’ve never saw the appeal of ReSharper, it always seemed that it was trying to do too much.

    I’ve been using CodeRush express for a long time, I found it a nice balance between VS shortcuts and logical tools. I don’t get why ReSharper needs to have live templates which always seemed to be like snippets, etc.

    I could survive quite easily without any plugins

  • JeroenH

    I really like R# but for large solutions it can become a real memory hog (just look at the number of ‘OutofMemory’ exception reports on their issue tracker site…). Also for large files (typically designer-generated), it can become very very slow.

    Still can’t live without it but it’s really annoying.

  • John

    My trial expired and I am to cheap to buy it… yet. But I hated switching back to plain old visual studios, I really miss a bunch of the features.

  • Andrey Titov

    I have tried to start using Resharper several times, but finally I throws it away. It takes too much attention to itself. Resharper releases often are unstable. It uses too much memory, it appreciably reduces VS responsiveness. It is too smart – it tries to make me feel that it’s better know how to write the code I’m writing. As if somebody seat behind my back and on each typed word cries that I’m doing all wrong, that this “if” should be written in reverse way, and if I click on it’s suggestioning lamp and allow to switch order, than it again cries “did you know that reverse order is also possible? :-p”. This makes me furious.

    For me Resharper is not tool for development (implementation). Yes, it provides a lot of things for speed up coding, but it also have a much things for distract you from logic you implementing and take too much attention on code you write.

    Resharper is a great tool for organize code. When you finished some part of functionality and get it work, than you can seat down with Resharper and make the code looks perfect. But I usually produce the good code at once, that there nothing to do with Resharper.

  • http://techshorts.blogspot.com darren

    I have used R# for I don’t know how long. Every once in a while I’ll load up CodeRush to see if it is any better and every time I wind up un-installing it and going back to R#.

    In CodeRush I start typing then all of a sudden it is like my screen is exploding! I find that I can’t work without my Find Usages or my Code Cleanup. But the worst is when I type {, I expect a } to show up but NO! I have to type it myself! The Horror!

    R# for ever.

  • Soulhuntre

    For me it’s CodeRush (I’ve tried both, CR suits me much better than R#). In any case, I certainly can code without it, but I am much faster with it.

    Ken

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  • http://www.sjmdev.com/ Simon Martin

    Personally I love CodeRush – and they’re looking at introducing a Test Runner with it. Having seen this used in many DimeCasts I think this will be an awesome feature and will maybe persuade some R# users to have a serious look at CodeRush.

    The sheer number of shortcuts in R# is a bit bewildering in CodeRush there’s just 1 shortcut that gives access to most of the refactorings so the learning curve is not as steep and you can become very productive very quickly.

    Could I go back to working without CodeRush? Of course, I could do all my coding in Notepad… but I wouldn’t like it for long.

  • http://web2asp.net David Ridgway

    Can’t beat R#, especially in a Team Dev environment, you can enforce code normalization without killing your entire team! Set up the templates properly or even easier run the code clean up yourself before a build! Once you get the hang of it, the shortcut Jedi comes out in you and I figure I’m at least 2 times faster than without it. I really can’t handle using the VS (not so) intellisense anymore so would find it hard to give it up!

    I still have some 10% discount coupons and 60 day extended trial licenses for ReSharper 4.5 if anyone is interested, see here for details:

    http://web2asp.net/2009/09/resharper-discount-and-extended-trial.html

  • Kirk Klobe

    You’ll take my Resharper when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

  • Mark Jones

    I used Resharper from the version 1 days all through 4.5.1.
    I saw it become more and more unstable with each new release. I stopped using it at version 4 because it was slowing down VS so much I was actually more productive without it. The Jetbrains folks promised stability and speed improvements in 4.5, so I paid for the upgrade ONCE AGAIN. It was only a few days before I uninstalled it again; I got tired of going into the add-in manager and disabling Resharper so I had some kind of response back in VS after each few minutes of use. I tried a bunch of nightly releases, then 4.5.1, before I finally have officially given up on Resharper as a lost cause.

    Oh, and over the years I have submitted many, many issues, discussed these issues in the forums, all to no avail. Resharper is all about new features, and not about stability of existing features.

  • vittore

    i was using R# for a several month and than go back to plain VS shortcuts. The only feature that i miss so much from R# is a convenient search files through part of identifier name or file name, cuz VS only allows you to quickly open file when you know it’s precious name.

  • Mike

    After the installation my machine ground to a halt. The intellisense took forever and my keyboard shortcuts were overwritten. It told me to do things that went against normal coding practices. I feel it is for lazy programmers, which is where the suggestion to use it came from.

    I have since uninstalled it and like many in my office never plan on using it again.

  • Alex Simkin

    @Mike

    “It told me to do things that went against normal coding practices.”
    Like what?

  • julius

    VS 2010 is unable to fetch the Resharper license from the server at my workplace, becuase I am currently locked out of VPN and I am now using VS2010 without Resharper. It’s just horrible. Live code error checking is disabled by default, you can’t ctrl+click functions and class names, there is no code completion is ascx files, no ctrl+alt+b/go to implementation, no refactoring, etc.

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