CodeRush

Since starting to make the move towards utilizing NHibernate in most of my projects I have been a little frustrated by the need to make properties virtual. This is by no means a criticism of NHibernate just the tooling, specifically Visual Studio 2010 and CodeRush. Whilst CodeRush has templates for everything the virtual keyword dosn’t seem to get a look in, fortunately it’s not hard to add support. Thanks to Rory Becker’s article on Creating Virtual Methods I had everything I needed to create the template. Auto-properties are actually significantly less complex than methods as they are composed of little more than the type, property name and the { get; set; } block. Templates are easy enough to create from the DevExpress Options Menu (DevExpress Menu -> Options) you jump to the templates page quickly with the search in the top left hand corner. I prefer to organize my custom templates into their own folder, then I can easily import and export these between machines via drop box. 1) Right click your preferred folder and select “New Template” inter “u?Type?” and press enter/OK. 2) Set the Context - I copied the context of my template from a?Type? and removed the InStruct directive, as virtual is not valid in structures, the Use: field should read something like this: ...

I have two hints today both of them involving changing accessibility modifiers. The first is a feature of CodeRush that I accidentally discovered while testing out the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools the second is a great new feature of Visual Studio 2010. For those who don’t know what I mean by accessibility modifiers, those are the keywords you put before blocks of code that define how that code can be accessed, this is all enforced by the compiler giving you nice compiler error messages if you violate these rules. To provide an example the following auto-properties are all have the accessibility modifier “public”: ...

As programmers we are well known for writing bug free perfectly formed code first time round, as such I don’t really understand why DevExpress implemented the code issues feature… no wait… that should be the other way round. CodeRush has several ways to access the Code Issues user interface, first off there is the thin file overview down the right hand side of the viewport. In the code itself there are handy contextual hints too. In this example, this. is redundant and has been greyed out, if you hover over it it will tell you more about the issue and how to resolve it. ...

Code outlining is a feature of supported by Visual Studio and many other editors, MSDN has some good documentation for VS2005, VS2008 and VS2010. If I were asked to explain this as briefly as possible, I would probably say: Code Outlining is the logical partitioning of code in such a way that the user interface, or editor, is able to selectively hide the body of the content (such as a class, struct, enum or method) whilst leaving the signature or some identifying comment visible. ...

I found this function totally accidentally when I knocked my mouse into a key when something interesting popped up on Twitter. I happened to have a variable selected like so: The key that I knocked was the Number Pad “+” key, and it expanded the selection like this: As any self respecting Systems Administrator would do I wondered if doing exactly the same thing repeatedly would have equal or compound effects. Strangely enough it worked, the selection will continue to expand selecting increasingly larger sections of code. The reverse works as well if you press the Number Pad “-” key the selection will be reduced. ...

As I mentioned in my previous entry I have started using DevExpress’s CodeRush Xpress. It is a free cut down version of CodeRush that I heard about in an episode of .NET Rocks. I have wanted add something to my Visual Studio development experience and I can’t justify the cost of either Resharper or CodeRush at the moment. There has been quite a bit of discussion about Resharper vs. CodeRush and in my experience most people I have spoken to love one and hate the other. I hope to be able to write a series of posts about some of the features found in CodeRush Xpress which I hope will clarify their purpose and use in my mind and maybe help someone find the function they are looking for. First off “Quick File Navigation”, this is a search function for locating a file by file name, I am finding it increasingly useful when looking through patches as it allows me to very quickly jump to a file name. Particularly as I am trying to move my projects to a one class per file so if I can remember the class name I can find the code file very quickly. The “Quick File Navigation” dialog is accessible through the keyboard short cut Ctrl+Alt+F. Typing will filter the list box by the name of the file matching anywhere in the filename including the extension. An additional feature for those who like me use CamelCase in their file names; if you enter your filter terms in capital letters it will search for capitalized words, in order within file names. Thus entering “AW” into the search box will also bring up the AboutWindow.cs in the above solution. Combining the above with the Ctrl-G keyboard shortcut in Visual Studio 2008 to go to a specific line we can do the following to go to line 162 in ShipLoadoutSelectWindow.cs: ...