Mixed Feelings on Tools like Resharper, CodeRush and Refactor Pro
Microsoft Visual Studio provides great extensibility for developers to create tools for fellow developers to use. Many of these add-ins are made to help developers gain productivity. I have been using a couple of these tools with similar features;
I have been a long-time user of the Visual Studio add-in tools CodeRush and Refactor Pro from DevExpress, and really like what the tools can do for my productivity. I’ve used the tool long enough to have a love-hate relationship with it. If I have a small solution open with a half dozen projects in it the tool is great and snappy but when I open up a solution with many projects CodeRush just takes over the memory in the system and makes having anything open except Visual Studio.
One client in particular has about 1.5-2.0 million lines of code in their solution and when open using CodeRush it makes Visual Studio become a memory hog and is unusable. I contacted support at Developer Express and they indicate they have not seen this before. Is this big of a project out of the ordinary for .NET projects? Am I out-of-line to expect CodeRush to work? I didn’t think so.
I then heard about this great product called ReSharper 4.0 which is changing the coding world. I purchased a license for it and gave it a whirl…fail. I experienced the same thing, great on small projects and unmanageable on large projects. The CPU utilization and the amount of memory used was too high to be used for any productivity whatsoever.
I have mixed feelings about using either of these tools in general day-to-day projects. I can only think that those people raving about these are folks not using them on big projects. As a regular user of Twitter I see developers saying how great these tools make the use of Visual Studio. I have to wonder if these are not just people using the tools for demos and no real work.
I think I have wasted money on both of these tools and will not be using them on any future projects. Anyone want a deal on a R# 4.0 or CodeRush 3 license? I have one of each.
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