The timing is perfect.  We’ve got a growing need to better understand how some of our code is interacting with some vendor provided 3rd party libraries and this is making a huge difference.   In true ReSharper form – this new functionality looks solid, and easy to use.  The ReSharper navigation tools we’ve all grown love (well maybe not just love, but also  to depend on) are available.   I’m not going to miss trying to navigate code only to be greeted with an Object Browser window. ..

Looks like a standalone decompiler/browser is also coming too…

And by saying “free”, we actually mean “free”.

Love it!  Keep up the great works JetBrains – looking forward to the release!

In the meantime, The Register has a good write up on some of the new goodies coming in an hour or so.  That will learn me for getting up early.  Oh well, time for another cap!

The NUnit test engine is great.   I didn’t realize this was a ReSharper tool at first.  Now, I can’t live without it.

The localization plugin is going to save me days of effort on an upcoming action item. 

The class/code generating tools are indispensible – especially if you create a lot of classes (e.g NHibernate POCO’s).

The refactorings have been helping me slowly increase the legibility of my code – and also helping me build better coding habits.  Check out the comparison between version 5.0 and 4.5.

If you’ve never tried ReSharper – now is the time.  only I could make the time to properly learn all the different tools available…

1. 1. performance and memory usage improvements
2. 2. Solution-wide code inspections (tons of cool tools to find unused params, privates, etc)
3. 3. VB9 support (too bad I’ve been busy moving to C# =])
4. 4. Native MSTest Support (I much prefer NUnit though)

Check it out.  ReSharper is one of the tools I use every day and couldn’t live without…One more day and I’ll be done in Visual Lisp and can actually try out the new release a little more =)

Press enter and you are prompted for the class name.  So Visual Studio has this of course, but this is a small example of some of the time savings you can achieve.  Enter the class name and you start off with an empty class.  Next, lets define a couple of private members.   Let’s run with the following example.

   1: namespace RADE.BO.Domain

   2: {

   3:     public class SampleClass

   4:     {

   5:         private Int32 _ID;

   6:         private String _Description;

   7:         private Int64 _BiggerInt;

   8:     }

   9: }

Simple class.  Three member variables.  Here is where the big time savers come in.  Next, click Alt+Insert again and you will be prompted with the following options:

Choose Properties.  You will now be given the option to select one or many fields, set the access rights, read only and virtual properties as well a bunch of others. 

Execute that and all of your get/sets are defined.  My one complaint is that ReSharper is not maintaining the type on the properties.  My Int32′s become int, and Int64′s become long’s.  Apparently this is slated to be fixed.  

So yes, this sample class is tiny, but the time savings on larger classes, or projects full of classes are significant.  The last feature I’ve been using extensively in this project is the generate constructor tool.  Again, a form is displayed with the defined properties, select the ones you want and boom.  You can create half a dozen different constructors in seconds.  I’ve created a full object model on, roughly 20 different mildly complex objects in less than an hour, around midnight on a Sunday =)

Some of the other things ReSharper does is suggest code cleanup ideas by removing unused directives, easy execution of NUnit tests, improved code completion.  I encourage you to check it out, download a ReSharper trial.