At the 2008 Day of Dot Net I won a software prize and took up Scott Spradlin on a DevExpress subscription to CodeRush and Refactor! Pro.  Scott purchased my electronic license and forwarded the information and I started working with both products at work and at home.  I was happy to see that both CodeRush and Refactor! supported Visual Basic and C# out of the box.  The other refactoring tool I am familiar with, Reshaper, is C# specific.  While I have come to really enjoy C#, Visual Basic is still a key language I use and it also has a few features that C# lacks (yes I’m talking about XML Literals and they are immensely useful for those of us dealing with lots of XML).

I originally installed the 2008 version but at the end of the first quarter I saw that the 2009 version was out.  I recently snagged that and started putting it to work in some of my work and home projects.  I noticed major performance improvements on both my work and personal machines, as well as some helper features that let you choose whether to use the DXCore functionality or the Visual Studio functionality for specific actions or key commands.

One of the main features that has been really useful for me as I work to learn the C# syntax is the CodeRush assistance window.  The assistance window gives you context sensitive key commands based on where your cursor is.  The commands are the same across both VB and C# so if I forget the syntax for creating an overloaded constructor I can simply hit ‘cc [space]‘ (no quotes) and activate the CodeRush constructor template which allows you to choose with properties or private fields to use as arguments in the constructor.

A few favorite features and short-cuts:

  • The "What happened?" dialog which lets you choose to override default studio behaviors with CodeRush behaviors.
  • Constructor Overload short-cut keys: cc space
  • Namespace optimizer: Hover over the right margin for code "issues".
  • Move type to file (Multiple classes in one file, hover over name of class to move, click on the three dots and choose "Move type to file")
  • Quick property short-cut keys: p space or ps space for a string property, etc
  • Extract interface: Hover over class hit ctrl + ` (default refactoring key)
  • C# automatic properties short-cut keys: as space for a string ao space for object, etc.

DevExpress has a free trial that you can check out if you are interested.  The pricing on CodeRush is $99 and I believe the pricing on the CodeRush and Refactor! Pro is $249.  I’ll find out next year when I renew.  I don’t spring for any development tools on my own dime but this one is useful enough that I’ll be happy to renew it next winter.