Brian On Software

JetBrains, makers of some of the best .NET development tools for Visual Studio, have released ReSharper 3.1 on this Christmas Eve. I have been using ReSharper since version 2.x came out, and I must say that it is very hard to develop without this tool. I don’t normally depend on a tool to drive my code, but this one is an exception, since it boosts productivity, quality and speed during development.

This new minor version provides a nice feature, Solution-Wide Analysis, which analyzes all projects in your solution looking for errors on-the-fly, without compiling it first. To enable this task, all you need to do is explicitly switch on the feature (make sure you have loaded a solution before enabling the feature), and then, after it analyzes your solution, view the list of errors in a dedicated window (Figure 2 shows you how to activate that window). You can also tell the analyzer to skip some files or folders (see Figure 1 for more information). Depending on the size of your solution and the performance of your hardware, this operation might take some time to execute (see Picture 3 for more information).

The most important characteristic of this feature is that you don’t have to compile the solution to get the list of errors, which can be of a great benefit for a solution consisting of a handful of projects which might take more time to compile than performing the Solution-Wide Analysis.

See what I meant by boosting a developer’s productivity, quality and speed? Check out the release notes for ReSharper 3.1.

Another cool gift from JetBrains is that if you purchase a license for ReSharper 3.1, you will get a free license for the next major release of the product, ReSharper 4.0.

Figure 1. ReSharper’s Solution-Wide Analysis window (new in version 3.1)

Figure 2a. Activate the Errors in Solution window

Figure 2b. This is the Errors in Solution window

Figure 3. The Solution-Wide Analysis operation might take a bite out of your hardware’s performance