Resharper vs. CodeRush for VS2005

February 08, 2006

I was introduced to ReSharper sometime last year and it became an indispensable tool for me.  Then VS2005 came out and -- ARRGH! -- ReSharper doesn't have support for 2005.  Only VS2003.  They've been working on the 2005 version for months and the beta builds are still pretty awful.  I'm doing a lot of development in both VS2003 and VS2005 so I'm switching pretty regularly and the lack of ReSharper support in VS2005 is starting make me...well...cranky.

Then last week I met Mark Miller from DevExpress and he gave me a demo of CodeRush.  It doesn't do everything that ReSharper does but it's mostly there.  I'm still not sold on CodeRush but that could be mostly because I don't have the keyboard shortcuts memorized yet.  It's very possible that I'll have those shortcuts memorized by the time that JetBrains releases the VS2005 version.  (10 minutes after the end of time?)

One thing that's been bugging me that CodeRush doesn't do is R#'s CTRL-B / Navigate To Definition functionality.  It occurred to me this morning that I could probably define my own keyboard shortcut in Visual Studio for it.  Answer: yes.

Go to Tools --> options --> Environment --> Keyboard then type "GoToDefinition" into the "Show commands containing" textbox.  Then set the shortcut that you want.  Done.

Another one was Resharper's CTRL-Enter / add “using“ statement feature.  Simply a great feature.  There's a shortcut for it in VS2005.  Shift-Alt-F10.

-Ben

Categories: good-stuff tech