The Back Story:

As a Microsoft MVP awardee, one of the many benefits is free software, books, and various products.  Some of the producers/manufacturers ask for reviews in exchange, others just ask for a brief mention (nothing is ever really free).  But considering that some of the products are essential to my everyday computing, I never mind mentioning their names and evangelizing their products.

One of these tools just happened to save me a countless number of hours.  With the release of Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010, JetBrains released their new 5.0 version of ReSharper.

The Story:

My specialty is Visual Basic development.  I am not, and probably will never be a C# developer.  As such, trying to figure out how to debug a C# project, that was written 2 years ago by a contract developer, let’s just say it’s a painful process.

I have a special class for config file reading and writing, written in C#.  I kept getting exceptions when the reader would get to a line that had an xml comment in it.  It took me a couple of hours to narrow down where it was happening and why, but I couldn’t figure out the best way to fix it.  It was a for loop that was implicitly casting the type of the variable.  I knew I need to explicitly cast the variable type, but only after the type was verified.  So after I finally got some of the code written, ReSharper gave me some suggestions on how to write the code better.

One of the ways was to safely cast the variable into the type I wanted.  Blammo, no more exceptions in a way I hadn’t anticipated.  Instead of having to check the type before I cast it.  Beautiful, simple, and taught me a better way to code C#.

Kudos JetBrains … now if it only worked better with VB (then it could be called ReBasic, ReVB, RE???)