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ReSharper Essentials

Chapter 1. Getting Started with ReSharper

We, as developers, want to perform the right tasks using the right tools. For .NET developers, the most popular tool is Microsoft Visual Studio. It contains almost everything you need to create .NET applications. If it lacks something, ReSharper fills that gap and adds many more functionalities.

ReSharper, as a .NET developer productivity tool, helps you in the tasks you need to perform on a daily basis. It helps you avoid doing boring, repetitive and manual things. It makes refactoring your code easier, saves you time by supporting navigation through the project, and helps by generating code. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

Introduction to ReSharper
Downloading and installing ReSharper
Basic configuration
Integrating ReSharper with Visual Studio

Introduction to ReSharper

ReSharper is probably the best plugin for Visual Studio. It extends your favorite IDE with a lot of incredibly useful features.

Note

ReSharper is developed by JetBrains (http://www.jetbrains.com). ReSharper v1.0 was released on July 21, 2004 as the second product of this company.

Thanks to the features, code generation and code templates, you will be able to write smarter code. Navigation and search will help you find things quicker. With code analysis and code cleanup, you can provide better quality software as ReSharper will find and highlight errors, potential problems, and bad practices in your code. ReSharper will support you with almost any kind of applications that you can write in Visual Studio.

Available versions

ReSharper comes in the following three versions:

C# Edition
VB.NET Edition
Full Edition

These versions differ in support for the main language used in your projects. According to the name, if you are using C#, you should choose the C# Edition. If you are using VB.NET, you should choose the VB.NET Edition. Finally, if you are using both these languages, you should choose the Full Edition.

All other features, such as support for web development, unit tests, and XAML are the same in all of these versions except decompiler, which is not available in the VB.NET Edition.

Apart from the provided features, ReSharper can be categorized based on license. Depending on your needs, you can purchase any of the following licenses:

Commercial License: ReSharper can be used by any developer in your company but the total number of concurrent users cannot exceed the number of purchased licenses
Personal License: ReSharper can be used only by the person who purchased it

If you are a teacher, a trainer, a Microsoft's MVP (Most Valuable Professional), or if you are working on a non-commercial open source project, you can get ReSharper for free.

Note

For more information about ReSharper licenses, you can visit the Licensing & Upgrade page at http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/buy/license-matrix.jsp.

Support for various versions of Visual Studio

ReSharper v8 provides support for Visual Studio 2013, 2012, 2010, 2008, and 2005. ReSharper works with all editions of Visual Studio except the Express Edition.

Note

ReSharper does not work with the Express Edition as it does not support add-ins and extensions.

It is also possible to use ReSharper with Visual Studio 2003. ReSharper 2.0 is still available; it provides support for this version of Visual Studio.

Support for various languages

ReSharper provides extensive support to many languages/technologies, which are listed as follows:

C#, VB.NET
ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS
NAnt, MSBuild
XML
XAML

It doesn't matter what kind of application you are working on, ReSharper will make your life easier!

Installing and configuring ReSharper

Although ReSharper comes in a couple of versions and supports various versions of Visual Studio, there is only one main installation package. The version used depends on the license key used during activation.

Tip

During the free 30-day trial, you use ReSharper as a Full Edition by default. You can change this in the License Information window. To open it, navigate to RESHARPER | Help | License Information… from the Visual Studio toolbar.

Installing ReSharper

Installing ReSharper is quite straightforward. Perform the following steps:

Download the main installation package from the Download ReSharper page at http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/download/index.html.
After opening the downloaded installation package, you should see the following screenshot:
In this step, you can select the versions of Visual Studio in which you would like to use ReSharper (in case you have more than one already installed).
From this screen, you can just click on Install to run the installation process, or click on Advanced to configure more settings.
If you have chosen Advanced settings, in the later steps you can choose what to do if you have a previous version of ReSharper already installed and how to change the installation location.

Configuring ReSharper

ReSharper is fully configurable. To access the ReSharper settings, you need to navigate to RESHARPER | Options from the Visual Studio toolbar.

Options

ReSharper configuration is divided into four areas, which are listed as follows:

Environment : This allows you to change the general ReSharper settings such as UI and Visual Studio integration
Code Inspection : This allows you to change the settings related to code analysis
Code Editing : This allows you to change the formatting, naming, and code cleanup rules
Tools: This allows you to change the ReSharper tool's settings, such as Unit Test frameworks, patterns used for to-do items, and navigation to external sources
Note
Code cleanup is a set of ReSharper features that make your code cleaner. Among the most important things, it can format your code, remove redundancies, and optimize the using (Imports in VB.NET) statements.

We will not go through all the available options in detail but present only those parts that, in our opinion, are the most useful.

Let's take a look at the tabs available under the Environment section.

The General tab

In this tab, you can change settings that are related to user interface. We suggest that you check the Show managed memory usage in status bar and Show tips on startup options. The first one will show you, on the bottom status bar, how much memory is used by ReSharper and the second one will try to teach you something new every time you open Visual Studio.

The Keyboard & Menus tab

This tab allows you to set how ReSharper integrates with Visual Studio. We propose that you check Hide overridden Visual Studio menu items and select Visual Studio as ReSharper keyboard scheme. The first one hides those options from the Visual Studio menu that are overridden by ReSharper; for example, the Refactor option in the context menu in the editor. This will indicate that you are using ReSharper features. The Visual Studio scheme adds shortcuts in order to avoid conflicts with the existing Visual Studio shortcuts.

Note

In this book, we will present many shortcuts and all will be related to the Visual Studio scheme. For shortcuts from the ReSharper 2.x/Intellij IDEA scheme, please check the ReSharper Documentation site at http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/documentation/.

Now, let's look at the tabs that are available under the Code Inspection section.

The Settings tab

This tab contains general settings for code analysis. Our suggestion is to check all the options available below the Enable code analysis checkbox:

Color identifiers
Highlight color usages
Analyze errors in whole solution
Show code inspection options in action list
Show the "Import namespace" action using popup

Note

Please note that checking the Analyze errors in whole solution option can hit Visual Studio's performance in big projects.

The Inspection Severity tab

This tab contains the most important settings related to code analysis. Settings are divided by language. It is highly recommended that you review these options to make sure that ReSharper will prompt suggestions that are consistent with your coding standards.

Next, we'll see the tabs under the Code Editing section.

The C#, VB.NET, and Naming Style tab

On this screen, you can find rules based on which ReSharper validates names used in your code. Same as with code analysis, it is recommended that you review the naming settings to make sure that they are consistent with your coding standards.

Note

There are many more interesting and useful settings. We encourage you to test a couple of different configurations to customize ReSharper to your needs.

Manage options

ReSharper v8 allows you to store configuration on the following three levels:

Computer: This contains settings that are applied to all your projects.
Solution team-shared: This contains settings for a specific project. These settings are stored in the sln.DotSettings file in your solution folder and override the settings specified at computer level. To share these settings with your team, you need to commit this file to your source control repository.
Configuration on this level should be used to share common coding standards, such as naming conventions, code formatting, and code inspection rules, with your team.
Solution personal: This contains your private settings. These settings are stored in the sln.DotSettings.User file in your solution folder and override Solution team-shared configuration. This file should not be committed to your source control repository as it will override other users' settings.
Usually, this level is used to change environment options such as preferred shortcuts, IntelliSense behaviors, and ReSharper UI settings.

To open the Manage Options… window, navigate to RESHARPER | Manage Options… from the Visual Studio toolbar. You can also open this window by clicking on the Manage… button in the Options window.

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Arkadiusz Benedykt Mar 06, 2014

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.

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Robert Bernstein Apr 28, 2014

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: [...]

Marc Schaerer May 12, 2014

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.

P. H. Merkel Sep 04, 2014

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#.

V. Sinitsyn Apr 03, 2014

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.

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

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The General tab

The Keyboard & Menus tab

The Settings tab

The Inspection Severity tab

The C#, VB.NET, and Naming Style tab

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