Resharper is becoming more and more monstrous. Soon it will be an IDE in itself and won’t need Visual Studio at all!
When a new 8.1 version was out, I was overly excited with it. Even paid almost 100 quid for a licence out of my own pocket (for my personal use). After using it for 2-3 months, I’m not so happy with it.
Project I mostly work on has some sizeable amount of MVC controllers and views: 180K lines of code excluding code for views. On this codebase R# is choking badly.
Autocomplete
A lot of the times I get very random completion suggestions, even through I almost typed complete name for local variable that was defined a line above. Many times I get some random namespaces added to using block because R# thought I’m done with typing and concluded that I need some random namespace. I’ve disabled Resharper Intelisence and now using native Visual Studio functionality for that. VS does seem to do not a bad job there. Also it is not as automatic as R#, so I need to press Ctrl+Space to get the completion. Yes, extra 2 keystrokes, but that protects you from random crap that R# decides to add to your class.
Go Anywhere
Go Anywhere in Resharper 7 was useful. Most of the times it got me where I needed to. In v8 this is a VERY global search, and order of suggestions is nowhere near how it should be. When I type “web.cofnig” in Go Anywhere box, I expect to see web.config file in root of the project as first suggestion. Not some other auto-generated classes that have web and config in their name somewhere, like MyApp.Web.Infrastructure.AutomapperBootstrap.config. Most of the times the suggestion is bang on, but when it is not, it is so wrong – I don’t know where to start rant about it. Also, why does it offer me auto-generated classes as a first navigation option? (think T4MVC-generated controllers).
Turns out that Visual Studio has it’s own Navigate To option. Usually invoked by Ctrl+,, but probably R# have messed up the keyboard shortcuts for you, so you’ll need to re-assign the mapping again. And navigation in VS is not trying to be very smart, hence getting me to the places I’d like to go.
I’m dependant on Resharper so much, at the moment I can’t work without it. This is bad! I’ll keep adding here native replacements to R# functionality, as I discover them.
Here are the options I’d like to find replacements to:
- Renaming of classes and controller actions
- Creating of new classes from their name.
- Initialise fields from constructor parameters – for IoC injections
- … probably another infinite list of functions coming from R#