The house of the converted, CodeRush is in the da house

I’m a flip-floppy sort of person when it comes to some tools. You love them or hate them. I’m somewhere in between.

When JetBrains released version 2.0 (finally) of it’s ReShaper product, I was quite happy to see it stablize and support VS2005. However I had been wavering because Mark Miller just blew me away with CodeRush and ReFactor! Pro down at PDC. What’s a girl to do? CodeRush together with ReFactor is sort of like ReSharper but missing some features I really want (like rename class and the Ctrl+F12 code navigator).

However I’m hooked on CR again. Mark was again pimping his product (sans voice) at TechEd and I got a copy of the lastest drop that clinched the deal. Not only does CR now have some new stuff like support of creating test fixtures and tests easily (maybe it was there the whole time) but there’s a killer feature using a tool window that shows you the structure of your code.

Nice. Not only can I learn the CR keystrokes better now (which has always been a problem for a dork like me) I can also see things in my code easier as the tool window is all context sensitive.

I’m sure there are some other features, but I’ve taken the plunge now and dumped ReSharper. Yes Mark, you’ve converted me dude. I’m tired of the long load times while parsing things (yes, 2.0 got better but it’s still sluggish) and I’m tired of the system crashing on me (it does from time to time with simple refactorings). CR + RefactorPro kicks butt and takes names. Yes, it’s missing some of the features ReSharper has that I like but hey, I can always write my own plugin using DxCore if I want.

Also check out Mark’s cool tip on giving Visual Studio a new desktop when editing forms. Check it out here.