5 ms·

In my experience it isn't one, two, or even three killer features. It's the aggregate additional polish and productivity increase gleaned from 10 to 20 minor f

In my experience it isn't one, two, or even three killer features. It's the aggregate additional polish and productivity increase gleaned from 10 to 20 minor features that shave fractions of seconds and remove a click or two off of incredibly common actions. And I just use the default settings.

mattmanser 13y ago
I've tried it a few times now, and never stuck with it. I think it's because I find the VS interface incredibly cluttered anyway, and Resharper just makes it worse. The right click menus are already 10 miles long filled with useless clutter and when it starts mucking around with the already edging towards overwhelming intellisense pop-ups it just annoyed me one too many time. After 2 weeks of trialling it then only thing I was really using was the "go to implementation..." but I've long since given up on the ridiculousness of making everything mockable anyway so it's only occasionally useful. The worst thing about VS is how slow it can be sometimes, even on incredibly powerful machines. In the end it's a glorified text editor and everything should be secondary to that. There's nothing more annoying than pressing ctrl-f (find) and then have it pause for 1/2 a second because it's trying to parse a massive html tree for intellisense you don't even need because you're just trying to delete a single node you know the name of.
- alkonaut 13y ago
  I agree the slowness of find (Ctrl+F) and the slowness of the xml/html parsers is still the worse thing about it. I can see how tag soup is hard to parse, but well formed xml should parse in milliseconds. On the bright side, with a good go-to-symbol, go-to-file, go-to-type etc., I search much less for free text. The text editor is only a tiny part of an IDE, the bits that are added are quite important. Integrated debugging (with edit+continue while debugging), integrated version control interface, integrated build system, integrated profiler and much more makes it so much more productive than having to e.g. do debugging with recompile/restart turnaround times.
  - mercurial 13y ago
    > Integrated debugging (with edit+continue while debugging) That's the main reason to use an IDE, in my mind, along with the ability to display the call sites of a function. > integrated version control interface, Never noticed any advantage compared to a shell with git or git-svn, personally. > integrated build system Depends what you mean by that. What's precious is the ability to detect errors before doing a build or testing anything. "Integrated build systems" in general I find often fall flat on their face when something outside of the IDE touches the files.
  - mattmanser 13y ago
    The text editor is by and far the most important part of the IDE and is the only part everyone will use. It's also the thing that's most important to flow, to producing, not navigating or testing. That it can pause and stutter when you're just trying to do a simple edit is pretty silly. I love VS and it's one of the things I always miss whenever using something else, but there's a lot of annoyances and a lot of sub-par features and some you should never use features. I notice you said "integrated version control interface", if you're talking about TFS, it's terrible. Stop using it. The interface is terrible, all generic tables that you can't tell apart. It's a massive effort to see file changes. And worse than all of that, the actual version control system is shockingly bad, even compared to SVN, let alone Git. You're a madman to be using TFS, it's so bad.

mattmanser 13y ago

I've tried it a few times now, and never stuck with it. I think it's because I find the VS interface incredibly cluttered anyway, and Resharper just makes it worse. The right click menus are already 10 miles long filled with useless clutter and when it starts mucking around with the already edging towards overwhelming intellisense pop-ups it just annoyed me one too many time. After 2 weeks of trialling it then only thing I was really using was the "go to implementation..." but I've long since given up on the ridiculousness of making everything mockable anyway so it's only occasionally useful. The worst thing about VS is how slow it can be sometimes, even on incredibly powerful machines. In the end it's a glorified text editor and everything should be secondary to that. There's nothing more annoying than pressing ctrl-f (find) and then have it pause for 1/2 a second because it's trying to parse a massive html tree for intellisense you don't even need because you're just trying to delete a single node you know the name of.

alkonaut 13y ago
I agree the slowness of find (Ctrl+F) and the slowness of the xml/html parsers is still the worse thing about it. I can see how tag soup is hard to parse, but well formed xml should parse in milliseconds. On the bright side, with a good go-to-symbol, go-to-file, go-to-type etc., I search much less for free text. The text editor is only a tiny part of an IDE, the bits that are added are quite important. Integrated debugging (with edit+continue while debugging), integrated version control interface, integrated build system, integrated profiler and much more makes it so much more productive than having to e.g. do debugging with recompile/restart turnaround times.
- mercurial 13y ago
  > Integrated debugging (with edit+continue while debugging) That's the main reason to use an IDE, in my mind, along with the ability to display the call sites of a function. > integrated version control interface, Never noticed any advantage compared to a shell with git or git-svn, personally. > integrated build system Depends what you mean by that. What's precious is the ability to detect errors before doing a build or testing anything. "Integrated build systems" in general I find often fall flat on their face when something outside of the IDE touches the files.
- mattmanser 13y ago
  The text editor is by and far the most important part of the IDE and is the only part everyone will use. It's also the thing that's most important to flow, to producing, not navigating or testing. That it can pause and stutter when you're just trying to do a simple edit is pretty silly. I love VS and it's one of the things I always miss whenever using something else, but there's a lot of annoyances and a lot of sub-par features and some you should never use features. I notice you said "integrated version control interface", if you're talking about TFS, it's terrible. Stop using it. The interface is terrible, all generic tables that you can't tell apart. It's a massive effort to see file changes. And worse than all of that, the actual version control system is shockingly bad, even compared to SVN, let alone Git. You're a madman to be using TFS, it's so bad.