Das Experiment, or a few days of life without Resharper

Introduction

Hello, my name is Vba and I am resharper-o dependent developer. I use the studio (at the moment 2013.3) in my professional activities to develop ASP .NET MVC / JavaScript / HTML5 applications. A week ago, on the “outcome *” of my resharper license, I wondered if I could live and work without it? Inspired by this and these posts and the fact that I was bewildered by the studio's constant suspense and its gluttony ** I decided to experiment.

Foreword

Many of you, having heard the comments about the problems with speed, probably thought to myself that I didn’t understand the tool settings and activated everything that could be activated, thereby transforming the studio into a brake on the five-year plan. I must assure you that this is not the case; I carefully followed the instructions for optimization, like this one .

In order to avoid misunderstanding of the “iron” component of the question, I give an example of my current configuration:

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Targets and goals

• The main goal of the experiment is an attempt to reproduce a productive development environment, with “abilities” and buns close to resharper.
• The second main goal is to try to make the studio more responsive, not decaying and quick. ***

So let's get started.

Built-in decompiler

Personally, I find it convenient to decompile and view code from third-party libraries right away, without leaving the studio’s bathhouse . Resharper gives this opportunity.

See if there is anything similar, but without Resharper.

Search on this topic was not successful. It was possible to find products like dotPeek , justDecompile or ILSpy , but none of them provided integration with the studio.

Established studio facilities

Of course, the basic features of the studio are much inferior to the Resharper buns, but they can be enough to cover 90% of the needs.

Navigation

Let's try setting up NavigateTo in the right way:


Further, after pressing the associated keys (in my case CTRL + N ), we get:


Of course, this will not find you HistoryController if you type hc , but you can live.

String manipulation

Here, praise the Buddha, almost everything is in order. I was able to easily configure the deletion of a string when pressing CTRL + Y :


Also using standard tools, I could set up to move the selected block of code up or down by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + UP / DOWN :


Well, also with the help of a small extension I was able to get a duplication of the current line or a selected fragment:


Unfortunately nothing could be found to expand / narrow the selection ( SHIFT + W / CTRL + SHIFT + W ). Although there is one option, it is to use the Vim extension , but it probably will not suit everyone.

Refactoring

As you probably could already guess, here you have to rely only on the studio’s standard facilities, i.e. I’m trying to retrieve variables / parameters / fields, cleverly renaming classes / controllers / actions /, helping to optimize the code and finding potential errors, and a bunch of small but useful functions. I still managed to find a couple of utility types like extensions to extract into a new file or extension for multiple edits . Not much but for the first time enough.

Templates

This is where the Snippet Designer extension helped me quite well; without it, managing templates was awful.

Other elements

Items that could not be replaced

Somehow, pretty quickly, I felt a lack of adviser, for example, about simplifying a linq query or about an unused variable. I do not know whether it is possible to fill it with regular studio facilities.

Similarly, the situation is with navigation through class members and through open or modified files.

Of course this is not the whole list of amenities and pleasant things that will have to be abandoned.

Elements, the disappearance of which pleased

I was terribly enraged in resharper that after refactoring, all the affected files with the note of change opened in my studio. I guess that this is not a whim of developers resharper, but rather a crutch associated with the rigidity of the studio itself.

Tests

Unfortunately, I can’t say anything on this part, as we are not using NCrunch and other test runners in the office.

Useful extensions

Someone probably will not discover anything new in this part, but I still try to give a list of free extensions that help me in everyday development.

• Auto history
• Code alignment
• Duplicate selection
• Indent guides
• Jslint
• MultiEditing
• Productivity Power Tool 2013
• Snippet designer
• Spell checker
• Move to New File Refactoring
• Web Essentials 2013

Results

The main goal of course is not achieved, but I intend to continue the experiment. Even if I lost in productivity, it seems to me that I won in speed (about 500MB of memory and more smart UI). Sadly aware of the fact that in the 21st century I have to watch as a development environment, come from the second half of the 20th century, eat memory, hang, spew curses and fall from time to time if I put such products on it as resharper. I think the guys from JetBrains have done a wonderful job, it just seems to me that Microsoft should do something with their product, otherwise its further use will be difficult. Although they probably do not care, because they have a monopoly.

Afterword

* Or rather, the impossibility of further updates due to the expiration of a certain period after the purchase of version number 7 of this product. This expiration took place for a long time, but I thought only recently.

** Under studio hangouts and its gluttony, I mean approximately 1.1Gb of memory on average design and the cursor's responsiveness when editing files.

*** I in no way consider that my problems with studio hangs are directly related to Resharper. I believe that the main problem of studio instability lies in itself, it can probably be devoted to a separate post.