Playing with ReSharper 4.5

So the brilliant minds at jetBrains have released ReSharper 4.5 and color me impressed.

Firstly, a main concern of mine has always been speed and performance of the development tool. It's not a productivity boost if you're waiting 20 mins for your code behind to load each time, I don't care how many bells and whistles you have. With previous releases of RS, namely the 4.x versions, I've noticed a direct correlation between the number of features and functionality and the slowdown in performance. I'm pleased to say that this release was focused on just that, and it does deliver. According to the jetBrains site, loading a complex solution is reduced by 20-40%. In practice I can say safely that I can see a 20-30% improvement. That is still huge, IMHO. I've also noticed that start-up time for VS2008 is also improved.

Another concern would be memory consumption. After loading a large solution with RS 4.x, it would be normal for VS2008 to consume over 700MB of RAM. I have 4GB running on a x64, but nonetheless you'd feel an application running in the background if it's using almost a quarter of the system's total RAM. I'm happy to report that this is NOT the case with RS 4.5! In fact loading the exact same solution with RS 4.5 the IDE consumes nearly 40% LESS memory.

Auto-generated source files have always been a problem for RS--this is no longer the case. It now seems to handle them with ease! Solution-wide inspections now improved in this release; a great feature as well... it will alert to you to normally very easily missed errors unassigned fields, unused parameters, unused return values, etc.

Overall, I'm very pleased with this release if for the performance improvements alone, it's great. As a developer you are doing yourself a disservice if you're still not using ReSharper whether your language of choice is C# or VB.NET, what ReSharper delivers to the productivity department you'd be hard-pressed to get anywhere else!


One word of advise with upgrading to RS4.5, especially on Vista, but true on XP as well, do yourself a favor and uninstall Windows Search 4.0. It's a resource hog and loves to slow everything down! You'll also want to delete all RS caches and let RS4.5 rebuild from scratch. This process yielded the best result for me.

Go out and get a copy of ReSharper 4.5 now! A personal license is $199, commercial license $349. You'll have an ROI within a few weeks... trust me! Just this developer's opinion...