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I currently use Resharper with VS 2008 Pro. I find it almost a necessity to be as productive as I can be due to lack of some of the basic refactors/shortcuts in VS.

However I was wondering if since VS 2008 improvements have been made that make it almost as good as Resharper?

Mike Q
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    The title presupposes resharper was ever an improvement, I've not felt it was anything but a pain, and in no way useful since VS2008 came out with refactoring built in.. But that's my opinion – Jimmy Hoffa Nov 23 '12 at 22:05

2 Answers2

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I won't use VS2010 without it (see disclaimer). That and productivity power tools. I use both in VS2012 too. I think it improves the development experience significantly. I can navigate the code quicker, refactor way quicker.

It can be a resource hog, but the functionality helps me a lot.

*disclaimer: I did actually use 2010 recently for about three hours for a test on a machine with no resharper and a single monitor. Not a pleasant experience.

Ian
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    "Friends don't let friends program without Resharper", as a colleague of mine once said. – Frank Shearar Nov 23 '12 at 22:53
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    Version 5 was a significant improvement over version 4.x. The memory usage came down significantly. – Apoorv Nov 24 '12 at 00:51
  • There's a new feature in 7 (might have been in previous versions, I've only just found it) which allows you to tell it to free some memory and also to display how much memory it is using. My current project when I've been working on it all day, VS2010 will consume about 1.5gig and Resharper reports it is using about 400meg. It's a largeish solution. – Ian Nov 24 '12 at 14:51
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My feelings about ReSharper are mixed, in contradistinction to a number of my teammates. My favorite features are the smallest, like:

  • Little icons in the left margin for unit test cases to run/debug unit tests.
  • The unit test runner is generally kind of nice.
  • The reference-fixing that it adds. It is really nice to be able to put the cursor over a missing reference, hit alt-enter and enter again to add the missing using statements (for assemblies referenced elsewhere in the solution, but not in the project, ReSharper can even add the assembly reference first). I love this feature in particular, because I like to compose new code in Vim, ignoring using statements and such, then use ReSharper to quickly add them all.

These are not likely to be worth paying for. I hate fighting ReSharper for my keybindings--when I use Visual Studio, I want to use Visual Studio, not ReSharper. I seldom use the more advanced refactoring features.

Michael
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