If you don’t know what that phrase means, you might not know what Resharper is.  Resharper is a tool by JetBrains that gave you refactoring support in VS.NET 2003.   The phrase “taking a resharper break” comes from the fact that when you go to open a VS.NET solution file (especially one with several projects) it can take several minutes, even on a fast machine with 2 GB of RAM.  I think I was one of only a few people on my previous team that did not uninstall it. Don’t get me wrong, I DO think it is very slow.  But I loved the refactoring tools that it gave me too much to give it up.

Which brings me to the Resharper 2.0 Beta.  Now I am working on a team that is only using VS.NET 2005.  I noticed that Resharper 2.0 has a version out for VS.NET 2005.  It was unclear on their site what features Resharper 2.0 would give me over what I already had in VS.NET 2005.  But last night, I installed in anyway…

Things that seem to be new: 

– Run Unit Tests (Doesn’t seem to recognise VSTS unit tests)
– Debug Unit Tests (Again, doesn’t seem to recognise VSTS unit tests) 
– A File Structure view that allows you to see your class by regions. (Basically just a fancy CTRL-M CTRL-O)

Things that don’t work so well

– When I Encapsulate a field in Resharper, it is not smart enough to realize that if my field is called “_isNullable” then I probably want my property to be called “IsNullable”.  VS.NET 2005 is smart enough to know this.
– Going along with the item above, Resharper does not give me the option of
– I get all kinds of red squigglies signifying errors in my code because Resharper does not handle Generics very well at all.

Getting back to the title of this post, I thought for sure that I read that JetBrains was going to make Resharper 2.0 **NOT** require preloading of all types in all assemblies before opening my VS.NET solution.  I was mistaken.  I still have to take a resharper break… 

Well, I do realize that this product is still in beta and maybe I will give it another try in a later beta or full release if I can see some justification for doing so.  But in the mean time, I am uninstalling Resharper and going back to just VS.NET 2005. 

VS.NET 2005 has a lot of the features people have been asking for and works very well for a beta release.  The VSTS features are especially cool but I know not everyone is going to be using that functionality.