VS2008 Add-Ins (CodeRush express for example)

[NickThissen]

Hey,

I only recently discovered the CodeRush Xpress productivity Add-In for Visual Studio, and I can't believe I ever used VS without it... I like it very much, it has some great features imo!

I have a 'holiday-job' as a junior programmer, and told my professional co-workers about this Add-In today, and showed them, and they had never seen it before either. A few of them also liked it, but some didn't...

I'm just wondering... What are your views on these kind of Add-Ins? Are there any others like them (preferably free), or is CodeRush Xpress like the only one?


As an example of why I love this Add-In so much, here's what happened to me today. I discovered one of it's features completely by accident.

Let's say I have a Listview, and a function GetListViewItem() that retrieves a ListViewItem from a string. Let's assume the function is quite a lengthy process and takes considerable time to run. Not very realistic, but ok.

ListView1.Items(2) = GetListViewItem("Hello")

After doing that, I realized that that's not all, I also want to change it's backcolor. So, in order to avoid having the run the function again, I need to store the ListViewItem that my function returns. Usually, I would do that manually by:
- Cutting "GetListViewItem("Hello")" from the line:

ListView1.Items(2) =

- Creating a new object to hold the item:

Dim item As ...
ListView1.Items(2) =

- Remembering I haven't got a clue what Type I need to create.
- Undoing until I have my GetListViewItem function again, so I can check what Type it returns
- Cutting it again, and finally writing it out:

        Dim item As ListViewItem = GetListViewItem("Hello")
        ListView1.Items(2) = item
        item.BackColor = Color.Red

Phew... Now, that actually only takes like 5 seconds. But still.

Here's what Coderush did for me.

Going back to step 1, I cut the GetListViewItem function part.
Then, all I need to do is Paste in the line before that, and this is what Coderush adds for me automatically:

Dim lGetListViewItem As ListViewItem = GetListViewItem("Hello")
        ListView1.Items(2) = lGetListViewItem

It automatically creates an object, with the correct Type, to hold my listviewitem, AND it automatically places that in the second line, where I cut my function from.

I had never seen it do that before, and had no clue how I did it at first; it just went automatically. That's really cool imo, I'm not even thinking about it and it is still helping me!


Also, being able to re-order function parameters automatically is also a great feature. I actually had to re-order two function parameters a few days ago, manually, before I got this add-in. It took me like half an hour to fix all the broken references to that function... It takes 2 seconds with coderush xpress...

[Cander]

Welcome to the awesomeness that is CodeRush. I couldn't live without it. I also use StyleCop. It is great tool that will dig through your code and make suggestions to make your code consistent with standards. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sourceanalysis.

AgentSmith is also awesome. http://www.agentsmithplugin.com/. It is free but it is a plugin for another plugin that is not free. It is pretty much a combination of StyleCop and CodeRush. Great Refactoring tool.