ReSharper IDE requests
Hi
I?ve been working with .NET tools for a a couple of years now I wanted
to send some requests for the upcoming ReSharper IDE (if I didn?t do, I
couldn?t really complain about anything I didn?t like when it came out. :) )
Here are my requests, in priority order, most important first
Request 1 ? Solution and Project Support
My ?most wanted? feature for the ReSharper IDE ? VS solution and project
support. Customers are probably going to migrate gradually to the
ReSharper IDE, with teams using both tools at the same time. I think
that if ReSharper did not support VS solutions and projects that would
pose a significant barrier to such parallel development.
This whole area is different to the Java world where there was no
?de-facto? for project structure, references, etc. Instead, Java
projects tend to use Ant as their common language for such things. In
.NET, people use NAnt, but not for the same thing. On projects I?ve
worked on recently our NAnt scripts just have 1 line to do the
compilation of the entire solution ? either an call to devenv or
a use of the NAnt ]]> task. Most of the time, developers never
end up using the NAnt script anyway ? its just there for build
automation or extra tasks (like database setup/teardown).
In summary, I think ReSharper must support .sln?s and .csproj?s for both
VS 2003 and 2005. NAnt and msbuild support is a much, much lower
priority that Ant support in IDEA, in my opinion.
Request 2 ? Jetbrains magic
The next most wanted feature is at least the same amount of code
navigation and refactoring that?s already in ReSharper. To me, ReSharper
1.0 was already good enough to enable the step-change in development
that I had when moving to IDEA over 3 years ago. Anything more than what
is in ReSharper 1.0 would be welcome but to me not critical.
Request 3 ? Test Driven Development support
In Visual Studio I use the ?TestDriven.NET? or ?NUnitAddin? product. Its
not as good as the JUnit support in IDEA, but its still pretty good. One
thing it does enable me to do is easily run unit tests with the
debugger. It would be somewhat painful to lose this integration, so I
would request either in-built NUnit support for the ReSharper IDE, or a
plugin mechanism that would allow the TestDriven.NET project to easily
provide a ReSharper version of their tool.
Request 4 ? Basic SCM integration
The SCM integration in Visual Studio can be painful (if you?re not using
VSS, which of course has its other major issues), but does work to some
extent. I?ve just been on a project which used Perforce, which itself
has support for Microsoft?s SCC IDE. A few things didn?t seem to work
(the most important one being ?delete?), but was good enough that 95% of
the time developers didn?t need to leave the IDE.
I think ReSharper should have some amount of SCM support. Visual
SourceSafe is probably top priority because of the number of people that
use it, closely followed by CVS and Perforce, then Subversion.
Personally I?d like to put Subversion at the top, but it doesn?t have
the user base to warrant that priority yet, I don?t think.- Nice to Haves ?
These are things that I would enjoy having, but not critical. Again in
priority order:
Request 5 ? Enhanced SCM integration
When I rename a class in ReSharper IDE, I?d like it to do the ?most
correct? thing in my SCM tool. In CVS, that would be a ?remove? and
?add? with part of the commit message saying what happened. In Perforce
it should do a ?p4 integrate? for the new file with a simultaneous ?p4
delete? for the old file. In Subversion it should do an ?svn move?.
Tracking file refactorings through SCM would be nice.
Request 6 ? NMock support
Probably way below your radar this one, but I?d find it useful if
shift-F6, sorry, I mean ?Rename Refactoring? supported NMock. NMock uses
string literals to reference Type and Method names, so a rename
refactoring tends to require some manual updates to get the tests
passing. I?m a TDD zealot though, and I don?t know if you guys buy-in to
the whole mocking thing. :)
Request 7 ? GTK# implementation
OK, this one is probably even more way out there, but one interesting
option would be to implement the whole of ReSharper IDE in GTK#. Why?
Because then it really opens up Mono (and so OSX and Linux) as a viable
.NET development platform. I personally haven?t used Mono yet, but the
lack of 'integrated with Visual Studio' tool support is one of the
reasons I haven?t.
That?s all. I hope these ideas are useful to some extent, and I look
forward to the ReSharper IDE EAP!
Cheers,
Mike
This was the biggest change, and surprise, to me in switching to
.NET from Java. In Java, I would have an IDE open, plus a couple of
command shells, a file explorer, an SCM tool, etc. With .NET development
all I tend to have opened is Visual Studio, and everything is run from
there.
--
mike roberts
http://mikeroberts.thoughtworks.net/
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Regarding req1: VS2005 does use MSBuild under the hood, so the new .csproj
files are comparable to build.xml.
Regards,
Thomas
"Mike Roberts" <mike.b.roberts.nospam@nospam.gmail.com> wrote in message
news:cs6lb8$nln$1@is.intellij.net...
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Hello Mike,
concerning Request 1):
ReSharper IDE will fully support VS solution files and MSBuild project files
(which VS 2005 use). It will also be able to load
VS 2003 solutions / projects, support for persisting projects into VS 2003
format is under discussion.
Regards,
Dmitry Shaporenkov
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"
Mike,
See my comments below:
This is exactly what we are going to do. We plan to support .sln and .csproj
files of both VS 2003 and VS 2005.
ReSharper IDE features will be a super-set of ReSharper add-in features.
So you'll get all what current ReSharper does and much more.
We will have good unit testing support embedded into the IDE (at least the
same functional as in IntelliJ). It will support NUnit, CSUnit and also have
API to support other testing frameworks.
We plan to support CVS, VSS and Subversion in the first release. And also
Open API to develop integrations with other source control systems. We ourself
use Perforce at the moment and know what a pain is using VSS with it.
No doubt our source control integrations will support refactorings seamlessly.
I think we will leave this for plug-ins.
Unfortunately our current implementation of the user interface uses Win32
API heavily. Perhaps we could rewrite it using GTK# but this would take lot
of efforts and we are yet not sure whether market demand for Mono development
tool is worth it.
Valentin Kipiatkov
Chief Scientist, Vice President of Product Development
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com <http://www.jetbrains.com/>
"Develop with pleasure!"
>
have
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If you can't support TestDriven.net, then please make sure that your unit
testing contains all the functionality of TestDriven.net. This is simply
one of the easiest ways to do unit testing hands down. The IDE integration
is amazing and it seems to work everywhere (text editor, solution view,
build output, etc.). The only thing I miss is the pretty red and green
colors...
Thanks,
Derek Price
Support for saving back is vital to me, and to anyone else who will likely
be working on team projects in a "mixed" environment where some people don't
want to leave VS.Net and others (like me) would want to use Resharper IDE
instead.
We'd need to both be able to work off the exact same project and solution
files transparently.
"Dmitry Shaporenkov" <dsha@jetbrains.com> wrote in message
news:7307632413025526551530@news.intellij.net...
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Agreed. One-way would be far from useful. Ideally, it would actually use
the VS csproj/sln files AS THE project file format.
---
Peter Provost
Weblog: http://www.peterprovost.org/
>> Hello Mike,
>>
>> concerning Request 1):
>>
>> ReSharper IDE will fully support VS solution files and MSBuild
>> project files (which VS 2005 use). It will also be able to load VS
>> 2003 solutions / projects, support for persisting projects into VS
>> 2003 format is under discussion.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Dmitry Shaporenkov
>> JetBrains, Inc
>> http://www.jetbrains.com
>> "Develop with pleasure!"
Valentin Kipiatkov (JetBrains) wrote:
> Solution and Project Support, Jetbrains magic, Test Driven
Development support
(all in)
Excellent - the first version of the tool should be able to kick Visual
Studio straight out of the door then. :)
> > Request 5 - Enhanced SCM integration
>
> No doubt our source control integrations will support refactorings
> seamlessly.
I asked since back in the first days of the SCM support in IDEA it
wasn't possible (IIRC) - a 'file rename' was just 2 separate 'add' and
'delete' calls on the API. I think this was because it was designed
around CVS which of course doesn't have any higher level functions.
Things may well have moved on since then since I haven't touched IDEA
for over 2 years.
> > Request 6 - NMock support
>
> I think we will leave this for plug-ins.
Thought you might. :)
One thing though - will the rename functionality in the IDE have the
same functionality as that in IDEA, i.e. it will also scan literal
strings as an option?
> > Request 7 - GTK# implementation
>
> Unfortunately our current implementation of the user interface uses Win32
> API heavily. Perhaps we could rewrite it using GTK# but this would
take lot
> of efforts and we are yet not sure whether market demand for Mono
> development tool is worth it.
Totally understandable. Oh well, still no excuse for me to buy a
PowerBook then.
One final thing - any idea when you will start the EAP for this? I know
most of my 'must have' functionality for developing is available to me
in VS + Resharper, but I'm looking forward to starting to give you guys
feedback on the complete IDE.
Cheers,
Mike
Hello Peter,
ReSharper IDE will use MSBuild proect files as the project file format. I'm
sure that supporting
persistence into VS 7 .csproj files is also not a big deal, although MSBuild
file format enables for much more
flexible description of the project structure using e.g. wildcard expressions
which will be lost when persisting
into VS 7 format.
Regards,
Dmitry Shaporenkov
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"
>> Support for saving back is vital to me, and to anyone else who will
>> likely be working on team projects in a "mixed" environment where
>> some people don't want to leave VS.Net and others (like me) would
>> want to use Resharper IDE instead.
>>
>> We'd need to both be able to work off the exact same project and
>> solution files transparently.
>>
>> "Dmitry Shaporenkov" <dsha@jetbrains.com> wrote in message
>> news:7307632413025526551530@news.intellij.net...
>>
>>> Hello Mike,
>>>
>>> concerning Request 1):
>>>
>>> ReSharper IDE will fully support VS solution files and MSBuild
>>> project files (which VS 2005 use). It will also be able to load VS
>>> 2003 solutions / projects, support for persisting projects into VS
>>> 2003 format is under discussion.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Dmitry Shaporenkov
>>> JetBrains, Inc
>>> http://www.jetbrains.com
>>> "Develop with pleasure!"
Mike,
We recently decided to focus on VS2005 plugin development since we
realized that we need to do much more that we planned initially to build
really solid plugin for VS2005. Good news are that the plug-in and the IDE
are based on the same codebase so it means that the enhanced functionality
we're preparing will also go to the IDE and the change of tactics will only
move IDE EAP after the time when the VS.NET 2005 plug-in is ready.
--
Oleg Stepanov
Software Developer
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"
Bidirectional support for VS 2003/2005 solution/project files will be a major
decision factor. I have a hard time envisioning an entire team switching
over to the Resharper IDE but I can understand a more hetegeneous IDE environment
in dev shops. Therefore this support will be a huge win in my mind.
Thanks,
Dave
http://www.davebettin.com/me/
On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 09:34:04 +0000 (UTC), Valentin Kipiatkov
(JetBrains) <valentin@jetbrains.com> wrote:
>> Request 7 - GTK# implementation
>
>Unfortunately our current implementation of the user interface uses Win32
>API heavily. Perhaps we could rewrite it using GTK# but this would take lot
>of efforts and we are yet not sure whether market demand for Mono development
>tool is worth it.
An alternative target would simply be .NET windows forms -- the latest
version of Mono now supports this.
No doubt it would still be a sacrifice in terms of performance and
flexibility.
- Casey