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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

As a newcomer to .net I was really confused by the lacking refactoring support in Visual Studio (yes, things we spoiled Java brats take for granted like extract method, extract class, move to separate file etc).

Is this available in VS 2017?

Edit: and live unit testing! I was looking forward to that until I found out it was only available in the enterprise version. (And yes, here you have an edge on Java anyway I think)

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Hi Eitland!

I'm a dev on the C#/VB IDE experience (and i've written and maintain many of the Refactorings for those languages). C# and VB do support refactorings like 'Extract Method' and 'Move to Separate File'.

We've also exposed a full analysis and code manipulation API through 'Roslyn' so that community members can contribute even more refactorings through extensions.

One reason this may not have been clear is that previously we didn't strongly indicate to you that a refactoring was available. i.e. when you selected some code to extract a method, you would then have to use ctrl-dot to get the list of things you could do. Now, in VS2017 we pop up our 'Lightbulb' whenever refactorings are available. This helps make the refactorings much more discoverable and we've seen a very large uptick in people invoking them now that it's much clearer that they're available.

If you use VS2017 and find issues with our fixes/refactorings, or you would like us to add more, please file feedback at https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn Thanks!

I'm afraid intellisense in VS 2017 is still a bit of a regression from VS2013, at least for the VB IDE.

Some gifs I prepared a while ago to explain what I mean (it seems that the parenthesis problem has been fixed in VS2017 though):

https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/grrrrr/Grrrrr.htm

Hi CM2187. Can you file these bugs over at https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn We can take a look and hopefully get fixes out for you soon!

I think "most everyone" just uses Resharper - Microsoft kind of has a background of letting a healthy ecosystem of 3rd party addin providers exist, and only gradually incorporates the best features into the core product.

Not at all. Never used resharper after 10+ years of .Net.

Most times when someone complains that Visual Studio is slow, you'll find they have Resharper installed.

Hard to live without though! I upgraded my PC to a 4.2ghz six core 6850k i7, 32gb ram and a 950 Pro NVME soon after I started dev in C#.

It was still slow, but somewhat less so. :)

i love the features of resharper, but after all these years, the performance is still super awful when you have large projects.

Every new version I give it a try to see if the perf problems are fixed, and every time I have to turn it off after a few hours.

Visual Assist by Whole Tomato Software [1] is a solid and well known refactoring plugin. For C++, it provides me a huge productivity boost. There is a C# version as well.

[1] http://www.wholetomato.com/

For live unit testing you really cannot go past Ncrunch.net. It is absolutely brilliant, colour coding the testing coverage and test results in the margins of the editor - which run and update as you type. I bought my own personal license for this.

Core support is coming; first beta just released. I believe that targeting a constantly changing tooling set was/is quite a challenge.

Correction: Remco has now released initial Core support in the mainline. :)))

Running a trial of that now. Loving it.

Will try reshaper as well before deciding to buy any of them.

Awesome, good luck! New to C# in January '16, I have been using both from day 1. The test runner in RS is an improvement on the built in, but doesn't really hold a candle to NCrunch. You use Resharper for all the other good bits though :) Together, the trifecta of Studio, NCrunch and Resharper is an unbeatable combination.

Beware: I'm pretty sure I failed a job interview as I was so used to Resharper, when I needed to do a test on a PC without I was fairly lost. They had no interest in my setting up unit tests first for the programming tasks so it might have been just as well.

New to C# in January '16

Same here.

Thanks for the updates.

For some reason I though Reshaper would be incompatible with NCrunch but I will try them together now.

- "Extract method" has always been supported.

- Resharper supports "Extract class" and "Move to separate file".

There are many refactorings already and if you want more you can invest in Resharper or CodeRush.

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