If you happen to be one of the many developers who are still coding up a storm in a Vanilla visual studio installation. This post is for you.

ReSharper is for many developers, myself included, a killer app and absolute necessity for staying productive while coding inside of visual studio. It is a coding productivity addin that adds a whole host of features that, if you are working in a plain VS install, you may not even realize how much you are missing.

A small bullet list of key features you may like are:

• Smart Code Navigation
• Refactoring
• Solution Wide Error Analysis

Those three bullet points actually expand out into a ton of features that would take way too much time to talk about!!

I have been working with ReSharper ever since it's first EAP builds were available a couple of years ago. Let me tell you that it has become a deal breaker for me with potential clients if I am requested to work on a machine without this tool. It is truly hard to express in mere words how much more productive you can become as a code writer when making use of this tool.

I won't bore you with too many details as the best advice I can give is to go an download a copy of Resharper and give it a test run for a couple of weeks. You really need to commit to a 2 week stint with significant coding time, if you really want to see what it could do for you. Even then, you really need to see it in action being utilized by someone who is extremely proficient in it, before you can really appreciate what it might be able to help you with.

Another thing that I need to stress is the responsiveness of the Jetbrains team in dealing with errors you may run into. The ability for them to interact and deal fast to issues that are raised by the community is truly amazing. I have had several issues in the last week that were resolved and integrated into latter builds very fast.

The current version is 4.1, though I recommend installing the 4.5 beta and giving it a whirl. Download Scott's awesome build updater and stay in sync without having to manually check!!

Develop With Passion!!