ReSharper 2.0 Continues to Disappoint
May 5th, 2006When Jetbrains announced that they were producing an extension to Visual Studio 2003 for C# a couple of years back I was excited. I have seen what they had done with IDEA and knew they understood how a developer wants to write code. So I purchased a license for it and for a short while I coded away happily. Unfortunately right at that point I started a couple of assignments which were all VB.NET which ReSharper 1.0 did not support. I was back to the lame support Visual Studio includes for code navigation and code generation.
Now for almost a year Jetbrains has been developing ReSharper 2.0 which has been delayed over and over due to bugs in either Visual Studio or within their own code. I have been tracking the build from the ReSharper EAP program and in some releases it is functional. But recently they chose to release a Beta to the public which is horrendous. The Known Issues documented for that release included an Ambiguous Class Definition bug which made the application unusable. They should not have released that build as the Beta.
Now as I continue to wait for a stable 2.0 release peoplehave suggested alternatives, such as CodeRush or JustCode. Apparently these extensions have been working with VS 2005 for some time now. Their features cover much of what I have relied on ReSharper to provide. The 2.0 release was supposed to be ready back in December, a month after the .NET 2.0 official release. Apparently there is something horribly wrong with their release management. Perhaps by the time C# 3.0 is released as Beta 1 Jetbrains will have a ReSharper 2.0 release to support C# 2.0.
May 7th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
Brennan, for refactoring in VB you can try CodeIt.Once - refactoring tool for VB.NET and C# in VS2003 and VS2005 - http://submain.com/cio/
Any feedback (good or bad) is welcome!
May 8th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
Hi Brennan,
we are sorry for the delays with ReSharper 2.0. One thing we have been waiting for with the release was VS2005 hotfix that fixed a mess VS2005 made of ReSharper highlighters. We have certainly had some internal problems, but we learn from mistakes quickly!
As to 'Duplicate definitions' problem that you mention, it was certainly annoying for those who have been hit by it, but as it was in fact only a minority of users, we have made a decision to publish Beta with it. Since then, this problem have been fixed - you are most wlecome to try the latest build at http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/ReSharper/Download .
At the moment, we are rapidly approaching the release, wich is planned for mid-May.
We hope we won't disappoint you further
Friendly,
Dmitry Lomov
Senior Software Developer
JetBrains Inc.
May 9th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
I am literally checking the download site many times a day. Dmitry, I am very anxious for the final release. I see lots of activity via email from my ITN error reports. I hope it all yields a very robust release.
May 16th, 2006 at 9:57 am
Brennan,
For code navigation (and many other features) check out my free Visual Studio 2003/2005 add-ons collection called DPack. Of course, C# as well as VB.NET is supported. Hope you like it. Thanks.