I've been getting up to speed with the latest Visual Studio and ReSharper versions while playing with the KarateChopInCSharp. Some observations thus far:
Visual Studio continues to make progress in the area of refactorings and quick fixes/assists. With just VS I was able to generate a class, method, field/local and constructor, though the method generation doesn't allow me to tab through the params of the method signature like R# does. These generations are available after typing in a class or method name (etc.) that doesn't yet exist.
Some things I still needed R# for including toggling inline conditions to if-else and extracting a local variable from a highlighted value, though I'm sure there are many more here. A big one for me is automatic code formatting. Code formatting allows me to be sloppy with my braces and indentions and the like. I'll frequently hit the shortcut for code formatting, freeing me from a fair amount of busy work. VS does do _some_ automatic formatting, for example, when typing a closing brace, but it's a bit limited and there's no way that I'm aware of to force a formatting on a highlighted section or the entire file without ReSharper.
One place Visual Studio appeared to be better than R# was with its unit test runner. With a small bank of MSTest tests, VS's runner was noticeably faster than R#, even with R#'s shadow copy feature turned off. I do miss the green bar in Visual Studio's runner UI, though - it is possible to have a failing test scrolled out of view and not have an obvious indicator of overall success or failure.
ReSharper remains a must-have tool for me. While it's good to see Visual Studio making progress, they're still years behind where Eclipse (and presumably IntelliJ) have been, and that's a shame.
(On a side note, I've been keeping some vssettings files for changing ReSharper keymaps to match (more or less) Eclipse defaults for a few years and have moved them all to GitHub, including a new one for VS2010 and R# 5.)
tags: ComputersAndTechnology
