I think you right, companies like Devexpress and JetBrains who develop .NET controls, add-ons seems like doing great. They are making money by being one step ah

I think you right, companies like Devexpress and JetBrains who develop .NET controls, add-ons seems like doing great. They are making money by being one step ahead and they always will be, therefore developers will keep spending money to resharper even though VS.NET 2010 comes with refactoring features. If you are willing to be more agile than the vendor you'll always have something, but if all you do provide something basic which can be simple replaced by the vendor, then yes, all you can do milk it as much as you can until vendor get there. (and for small project, one-man shops even this makes a lot of sense)