SuperJason’s Personal Blog

Almost two years ago, I found a utility called Resharper.  There were a lot of people talking about all of the cool things it did, including refactoring.  At the time, I didn't know what refactoring.  It basically comes down to rewriting your code so that it does the same thing, but in a simpler fashion.  Resharper also claims to simplify a lot of the repetitive tasks in Visual Studio.

I downloaded it, installed it, and loved it.  There were definitely some features that I love, including "Encapsulate Field", which will take a private field and put a public wrapper around it for encapsulation.  You can also easily rename variables, methods, classes, etc., and it will almost instantly update all references and calls so that they keep on working.  It will also automatically add "using" statements if you're missing one for a type that you're trying to use.  That one sure is slick.

What I didn't know was that all of this functionality would come at a horrible price.  I quickly realized that the performance of Visual Studio was significantly worse than usual.  I ended up uninstalling it, and things sped back up.

I kept coding like I always did, but no I had to go through withdrawls.  It was tough losing all of those cool features.

Recently I gave Resharper another shot.  I installed their 2.0 version for Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 (they are separate installs).  Again, for a while, the penalty almost seemed worth it.  Then I installed SP1 for Visual Studio 2003, which had a lot of fixes, but now it seems to have broken some of the bizarre hacks that Resharper would use to do its thing.

A new version of Resharper was recently released, and it was probably at least partially in response to the new service pack.  Looking at the list of fixes, I'm not even sure what to make of it.  They apparently had a LOT of bugs.  Of course I was already aware of many, due to their bug reporting tool that would constantly pop up.

I installed the latest version HOPING that I could finally have my cake an eat it too.  It turned out being a little faster, but still very pathetic.  Not only that, but the thing takes FOREVER to install and uninstall.  I'm not sure what these guys are doing.  I was also having problems because the intellisense in Resharper and the built in intellisense appear to be fighting, and the only victim is me.

So if you want my advice, avoid using Visual Studio 2003 if you can, because you can't really win that game.  If you can use Visual Studio 2005, do so, because at least you get some refactoring, but it is slow.  2005 is great in the fact that it loads insanely fast, it's tough to live without that.

So now I'm waiting for Resharper to uninstall, and it's been going for almost 30 minutes so far, and it looks like it's 2/3 done.  How can it possibly take that long?  What could it possibly be doing?

Ok, while I'm at it, one more thing.  Why the @#$^ did they put unit test stuff into Resharper?  That is completely stupid, especially since the code coverage add-on is separate.  I don't want the unit tests integrated.  I want separate pieces so that I can pick and choose what I want.  I would rather use Test Driven.NET because of all of its features.

The Resharper guys need to do SOMETHING.  This is rediculous.  Maybe they can release a lite version, so that I can at least get a couple of critical features.  Please?