Visual Studio Add-Ins (Poll Result) | Hacker News Reader

Visual Studio Add-Ins (Poll Result)

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25 pointsjohnastuntz27 comments

Part of me has always been kinda surprised that Microsoft haven't bought ReSharper from JetBrains and integrated it as a special add-in for the Ultimate branch of Visual Studio.

Interesting reading nonetheless, the original post has some good comments: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mikeormond/archive/2010/09/03/msdn-f...

Yeah, I am also astounded that the refactoring tools in VS haven't been massively beefed up.

VS2010 is a step in that direction.

yep, I remember seeing a few discussions around 'do I really need Resharper with Visual Studio 2010?' because they added a whole bunch of functionality that Resharper had.

In fact it prompted this: http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/documentation/comparisonM...

Yeah, as that makes clear, Resharper is still staggeringly better.

I think that Resharper is too bloated and instable. I use only Metascroll (a continuation of Rockscroll) for a fancy scrollbar and highlighting of intersting stuff in source.

There are an awful lot of people who swear by Resharper. If that's all you've replaced it with, it's likely you've not sampled all of the power it gives you.

Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

I think its both. I find it hard to work without resharper, yet it is a bloated, buggy pile of crap at times.

When I used Visual Studio 2003, Resharper was necessary to get anything done. When I used Visual Studio 2005, Resharper added a bunch of nice features that made it more pleasant. Now, when I'm using Visual Studio 2008, I no longer use ReSharper, since most of the functionality is native. There are a few features I miss, but to me they didn't motivate the longer startup times and general sluggishness that Resharper unfortunately adds.

How do you replace Navigate functionality of Resharper in native 2008?

(in IntelliJ IDEA keyboard layout)

Ctrl+N Go to Type

Ctrl+Shift+N Go to File

Ctrl+F12 Go to Member

These three bindings alone can make any developer 2-3x productive in daily coding activities.

I use a smaller plugin for that called StudioTools: http://submain.com/products/studiotools.aspx

And I agree, those features make you so much more productive!

Three times more productive?

I believe so.

It's like instant teleportation all over the solution. No mouse. No struggling with the Solution Explorer. Example:

Ctrl+N, type FAM, all classes matching the pascal casing with (F)xx(A)xx(M)xx will be displayed, like FormsAuthManager. Select one with keyboard to navigate to the file. Once there, Ctrl+F12, type VU for ValidateUser and enter to navigate to method, etc.

An old but a good start is 31 Days of Resharper:

http://blog.excastle.com/2007/01/31/blog-event-the-31-days-o...

Is it different from F12 Go to definition in VS?

Yes, that is what you use to follow a chain of definitions from one file to the next. The smart goto functionality allows you to start typing the name of any type in your project and navigate to it, or start typing the name of any filename in your project and navigate to it.

Try out the StudioTools plugin I linked to above and see what you think. Default is alt+o to open any file, and ctrl-g to go to any type.

I admit I haven't tried it much.

Slight correction: MetalScroll, not MetaScroll

link: http://code.google.com/p/metalscroll/

I agree a bit. Unless you have a real ballsy machine you notice a pretty significant performance hit -- especially wrt the intellisense related tools.

it can be unstable, though the new version has solved most of my problems with it.

I've been using visual studio quite awhile now, and am still appalled that there is not good integration with any source control system. Subversion is only 3%!? Shouldn't every coder use source control? TFS doesn't count when CVS, SVN, hg, and git are all free and widely spread. VSS doesn't count either =P The subversion plugins are ok at best.

ReSharper adds a lot of features to VS that is standard in Eclipse and IntelliJ in the Java world, hence many people love ReSharper, esp transplants from the Java world.

Visual Studio has built in hooks for adding in source control support. It's not really MS's fault that few take advantage of this. Whenever you create a solution one option is "add to source control", it's up to your current source control extension to take and run with it if you do check that box. In Tools > Options > Source Control, you can choose your source control plugin.

With that said, I never use source control within Visual Studio. I always have good ol' bash running git off to the side. I much prefer my IDE not know nor try to do too much, it often ends up in disaster.

I've been using the VisualSVN plugin for the past few years and have found it to be really pleasant. It's $50, but it's been well worth it for me. http://visualsvn.com/

Alternatively, it sounds like AnhkSVN has been making some great strides lately, but a bad experience with it several years back has kept me away from it. They're free, so they might be worth checking out as well. http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/

visualSVN is good and AnkhSVN is a decent free one. I've never placed a massive priority on source control integration to the IDE though, TortoiseSVN does fine for me.

What workflow do you use that requires it to be integrated into the IDE, or is it just a convenience thing?

The problem is that version control system integration in VS itself is usually worse than the same integration in the regular filesystem explorer.

If they only could get something that is on par with what Eclipse has I'd be very happy.

One plugin that would be really useful would be a source verifier that alerts you when your code won't run on, say, a given version of .NET or Mono.

MoMA kind of does that - http://www.mono-project.com/MoMA

Cool. Now we need one for Xcode that warns when code won't compile/run on GNUStep

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