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ReSharper Essentials
ReSharper Essentials

ReSharper Essentials: Make your Microsoft Visual Studio work smarter with ReSharper.

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ReSharper Essentials

Chapter 2. Write Smarter Code

In this chapter, we will focus on one of the most important parts of a developer's work—writing code. ReSharper comes with many features that speed up writing and editing code. It is not possible to go through all of them in one book so we will focus on the most important ones.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Generating code

  • Using code editing helpers

  • Templates

  • Refactoring

Code generation


There are many other ways to write code rather than simply pressing keys on your keyboard. ReSharper comes with many features that can generate code for you. You can find some of these features directly in Visual Studio but ReSharper comes with more. Even if ReSharper comes with some feature that exists in Visual Studio, ReSharper provides more user-friendly ways to use it.

Generating code for non-existent objects

Usually, when you are designing a class in your project, you start by writing complete code, such as class name, properties, and functions. When you are done, you can use that class in your application.

What if I told you there is a different way?

How about you start using your class before creating it and then let ReSharper create what you need?

Tip

This is a standard approach when you write applications using Test Driven Design (TDD).

As the best way to learn something is to start doing it, we will show you how ReSharper helps with generating code.

Let's open Visual Studio...

Using code editing helpers


Writing code is not only about writing, but also about getting more information on your code and support editing it.

Enhanced IntelliSense

IntelliSense is a standard tool in Visual Studio. ReSharper extends it by adding a couple of very useful features.

One of the most useful extensions for IntelliSense is CamelHumps, which allows you to filter options from IntelliSense by writing only capital letters from prompted options. By typing just UM (or um), ReSharper displays UserManager(), UnmanagedMarshal, and so on, as shown in the following screenshot:

ReSharper also extends the available options by adding objects from namespaces that are not used in the current file. In the preceding screenshot, only the first option comes from a developed project and the others come from unused namespaces.

For comparison, the options available when you are not using ReSharper are shown in the following screenshot:

ReSharper provides smart mode too that, in a smart way, filters the available...

Templates


ReSharper provides you with a very powerful template mechanism that generates code for the most commonly used actions, such as creating a new class, constructor, and the const variables.

Templates as snippets

Visual Studio provides you with simple templates called snippets by default. ReSharper extends these templates with Live Templates. Live Templates can be accessed using the Ctrl + E, L shortcut or by using an associated name.

Do you need a GUID? Just write nguid and press Tab. Do you need an iterator? Write iterindex. Maybe you need to override the Equals() method? Write equals.

By pressing Ctrl + E, L, you can review all the available Live Templates.

File template

With Live Templates, you can generate some parts of code but ReSharper allows you to generate whole files too.

Creating a new file from a template can be done by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Insert in the code editor or by pressing Alt + Insert in the Solution Explorer.

Customization

Each ReSharper template can be configured....

Refactoring


You will seldom work with the ideal code. Almost every code can be improved—variables or methods can have better names, and code can be better structured and less complicated. This means that you would like to refactor such code. Refactoring code is a very hard and complicated process but ReSharper makes it a bit less painful.

Let's go back to our code that was used at the beginning of this chapter and refactor it a bit.

Rename

Let's say that we would like to rename the Repository property to UserRepository. Move your cursor to the definition or usage of this property and press Ctrl + R, R, input a new name, and press Enter. ReSharper will rename all occurrences of this property.

ReSharper also checks your string values, comments, JavaScript code, and other string literals as there can be some values related to our code that should also be updated. As you can see in the following screenshot, ReSharper displays all the places that can be potentially updated and allows you to check...

Summary


It has been an interesting journey. We have learned about a lot of features that help you in writing code. Review this chapter, note down the presented shortcuts, and try to use them. If you are writing similar code again, maybe it is worth creating a custom template. Think how you can use the features presented in this chapter for your daily work. Write code smarter.

In the next chapter, we will check how ReSharper can improve navigation through our solution and makes it easier to find what you need. See you on the next page!

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Feb 20, 2014
Length: 124 pages
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Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781849698702
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Product Details

Publication date : Feb 20, 2014
Length: 124 pages
Edition :
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781849698702
Category :

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Table of Contents

10 Chapters
Getting Started with ReSharper Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Write Smarter Code Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Finding What You Need Quickly Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Making Your Code Better Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Extended Support for Web Developers Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Unit Testing Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Extending ReSharper Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Tools for Architects Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Code Analysis Beyond Visual Studio Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Recommended Plugins Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.3
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Arkadiusz Benedykt Mar 06, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
It's a short, well prepared book. If you've bought a ReSharper for the first time it's a must have. Book covers basics of usage, some more advanced topics, shows some basics of building extensions and what is important, shows the architecture graph.More advanced users won't find it to much interesting but I don't think that they're the target group for this position.One thing I was missing are Idea Intelij shortcuts - only Visual Studio ones are shown.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Robert Bernstein Apr 28, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I am really impressed with this book. The author communicates with the reader as though he is personally walking you through practical tutorials about how to use ReSharper; it feels like you're being taught by a colleague who knows the tool really well. I am a huge fan of ReSharper's refactoring capabilities, so I was happy to see that the book mentions refactoring in its second paragraph. I find this to be one of the most useful features of ReSharper and appreciate the fact that the author shares the same sentiment.The book covers a lot of material and ReSharper is a very feature-rich tool that is hard to fully encompass in a single publication. The author has done an excellent job of covering the most commonly-used productivity enhancements that it provides. In addition, he has included a great keyboard shortcut cheat sheet at the end of the book that lists the ones he covered, in the order that he introduced them through the chapters. I have found this to be a great ReSharper refresher as I write code.I have been using ReSharper for years and am amazed at how much I didn't know about the product. Features like Safe Delete, covered in Chapter 2, would have saved me a lot of extra manual refactoring work that I've done in the past. Even some features that I would leverage less frequently, such as ReSharper's ability to provide IntelliSense with the MSBuild and NAnt build systems, are mentioned in the book. References like this inspired me to go learn more about the product features through Internet searches.He wraps up the book by discussing how to write ReSharper plug-ins to add features not already included in the product, how to debug those plug-ins, and how to deploy your plug-ins. His explanation of the plug-in architecture and his examples are very clear and easy to follow. Although some of the deeper details of these activities are not included in the book, the author provides links to find the instructions on the Internet. He also recommends a number of released plug-ins that you should consider installing to enhance ReSharper's built-in capabilities.I want to thank Packt Publishing for providing me with a copy of the book for review. It is a fairly quick read that will make you even more productive with Visual Studio and ReSharper. The biggest challenge I found with the book is being able to remember all of the great keyboard shortcuts so I always have them at the ready! This is a great book for any C#/VB .NET developer. If you don't already use ReSharper, this book will show you what you have been missing.You can also find details at the publisher's site here: [...]
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Marc Schaerer May 12, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
After using Resharper for years for lightweight usage, I didn't know what to expect exactly from Resharper Essentials. I can say that I'm pleasantly surprised by what the book offered for its size, often written in a easily consumable form.Not only did it cover useful things I was not aware of yet, its coverage of Resharper 8 also introduced me to several hidden gems I this far missed, be it the architecture view, the enhanced code quality analysis capabilities or multifile templates.Especially the early focus on using Resharper from a Test Driven Development way of coding was very welcome as the creation and refactor aspects help a lot in breaking down the inner barrier many have regarding real TDD style coding.I highly recommend this book to everyone who uses Resharper for the first time or thus far used Resharper only lightly and would like to step up their productivity but also code quality.It will enable you to leverage a far larger amount of Resharpers power and create better code in significantly less time.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
P. H. Merkel Sep 04, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
The book is a very good overview but it misses out on details and advanced advises at the 'writing better code' chapter.I can recommend it to anyone trying to get a quick inside and start with R#.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
V. Sinitsyn Apr 03, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
I've bought "ReSharper Essentials" (the e-book variant) a few weeks ago, and shortly after I finished reading it I was asked to leave a review.I'm a long-time user of stand-alone JetBrains IDEs, and I bought this book after I was assigned a Visual Studio-based project to see if there are any Windows/.NET/VS-specific tricks or features I was unaware of.The book is well-written and relatively short to read in a few days of lunches. I can't say it mentions many features I wasn't aware of, however after finishing it I found myself using ReSharper more extensively than before. If you a new to JetBrains tools (and ReSharper in particular), you'll find a thorough description of what it is capable of; if you are already a seasoned user, it will probably help you to build a complete picture. I especially liked the chapter on recommended ReSharper plugins. You can find loads of these plugins on the Internet: some are real time savers, some aren't - and some guidance is certainly helpful here.The downside is that the book mostly scratches the surface. This is not bad, given its size, however, I'd prefer more tips and advices on how to use ReSharper in real-world scenarios, and less reference material (ReSharper comes with the good documentation, after all). Besides this, all hotkeys in the book are for Visual Studio, not IDEA keyboard scheme, which may come unhandy.To sum up: it's a good introduction to ReSharper, but don't expect too much news if you are already using the tool for a year or more.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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