I used to be very happy with pretty much everything JetBrains released, but lately they seem to be having some serious quality issues with their Resharper product.  The 5.0 release was pretty much unusable for us due to a stupid bug in their Silverlight support.  It was fixed in the 5.1 EAP builds, but the newly released 5.1 version has another major (IMO) problem when it comes to running tests:

It no longer runs inherited tests.  Which is especially annoying to us because we use inherited tests to make sure that our NHibernate CRUD operations work.  We also use the inherited tests pattern for some other things, but that means we’re pretty much screwed now.

The bug has already been reported but since they closed the Early Access Program due to the release of 5.1, i guess we’re gonna have to wait quite a while before we can get our hands on a version that has a usable test runner.

If anyone from the Resharper team reads this: please tell me how on earth something like this could break in a bugfix release?  You sell software for continuous integration, for code coverage, for running tests.  If you’d actually use these things and wrote correct tests then this wouldn’t have happened…

A couple of months ago, i showed a sneak preview of a Silverlight unit testing Resharper plugin that one of my coworkers was working on.  I’m glad to say it’s finally been released and you can get it here

Those are Silverlight tests, executed through Resharper within the Silverlight runtime

I’ve been a longtime fan of Resharper and pretty much don’t even want to use Visual Studio without it.  But we’re in the process of upgrading to Visual Studio 2010, Resharper 5, Silverlight 4 and (later on) .NET 4 and yesterday we made a bit of a painful discovery.  It turns out that using Resharper 5 in Visual Studio 2010 actually makes your development experience worse than it is by default if you’re using Silverlight 4. 

The first problem is this:

If you use Action a lot in your code (and we do) then you’re pretty much screwed.  Resharper doesn’t recognize it and continually suggests changing it to a generic type.  Now, you can just press escape and go on working but it’s still very, very annoying.

Another thing that’s highly annoying is this:

This is valid code, but Resharper doesn’t quite agree with us…  Which of course also makes solution-wide analysis completely useless:

And this is in a solution which actually has no real errors whatsoever.

This should be fixed in Resharper 5.1, but unfortunately, that won’t be out until June.  We can only hope that the EAP builds of 5.1 start showing up ASAP because this situation really sucks for those who’re working with Silverlight 4.

So in case anyone of Jetbrains is reading this: please hurry up and get those EAP builds out the door so we can start using (and enjoying) your product again