ReSharper 5 – Coding Assistance & Templates

Coding Assistance in ReSharper is great,  meanwhile templates are one big disappointment.
They should be done much better, but I’ll talk about them latter. First I’ll focus
on what ReSharper brings.

In code editor you notice some nice icons that appear next to the caret location.
This are context actions, which are allowing you to quickly edit, refactor, navigate,
fix or generate code. Very handy, indeed. Here are icons that you should pay attention
to:

	- for code editing
	- for refactoring
	- for navigation
	- for quick fixes
	- for code generating

Context actions are accessible by clicking the icon or by pressing Alt+Return. Below
is an example how context actions looks like.

It’s also hard to miss hints above context actions. They usually appear in association
with missing using directives, like shown on a picture below.

When a reference to assembly is missing, this hint doesn’t appear. However, ReSharper
is able to add a correct reference to project references.

Once you start typing you’ll notice that IntelliSense from Visual Studio has been
replaced with a new one. Don’t panic, this is ReSharper’s default option and can
be later changed in Options dialog. New IntelliSense is much better from the one
in Visual Studio and what I especially like is code completion. It provides three
different modes:

• Symbol Completion (Ctrl+Space) – completes
  names of classes, methods, variables, keywords, and any other symbols that are available
  within the current visibility scope (including extension methods that were
  previously imported).

  

• Smart Completion (Ctrl+Shift+Space)
  - filters the list of types, methods, and variables to match the expected type of
  an expression. It works anywhere as long as ReSharper can determine the expected
  type of the expression, for example, right-hand sides of assignments, variable initializers,
  or return statements. If several return types are possible, ReSharper detects the
  most recently used symbol of an applicable type and automatically selects it in
  the lookup list. Smart Completion can also suggest creating anonymous delegates,
  lambda expressions, and regular methods, as well as local variables for out parameters.
  In addition to that, in object initializers, Smart Completion suggests fields/properties
  that were not yet assigned a value.

  

• Import Symbol Completion (Shift+Alt+Space) –
  displays all types that match a given prefix regardless of what namespace they belong
  to (as opposed to Symbol Completion, which only completes names of currently visible
  types). Import Symbol Completion automatically inserts appropriate namespace import
  directives to the current file if a selected type has not been imported previously.
  It also works after dot with extension methods and puts necessary using directives.

  

In general, this IntelliSense is quite a monster, but it takes a little bit to get
used to it.

Wondering what’s more? There’re some really nice sugars like

• Complete Statement (Ctrl+Shift+Enter)
  – is a feature that inserts necessary syntax elements (braces, semicolons etc.)
  and gets you in position to start the next statement.

  

• Parameter Information – shows up the tooltip regarding the current parameter.
  I find this very useless. Maybe a picture tells thousand words why. But that’s just
  my opinion.

  
  

• Quick Documentation… – shows up a tooltip with
  a quick documentation. Very handy.

  

• Generate Code (Alt+Ins) - this functionality provides you with options to
  generate code from editor and solution tree. With it, your able to generate classes,
  interfaces, constructors, delegates, override members,… Oh god, I love this. No
  more “Add new dialog”.

  
   

• Insert Live Template… – allows you to insert a code template. Tough a list
  of predefined templates is very short (around 30 templates all together), it’s possible
  to create your own templates with ease.

  
  

• Surround With Template… – gives you an ability to surround your code with
  region, compiler directives, code block,… At times, this could be useful, but
  that’s up to you.
  
• Extend Selection (Ctrl+W) – allows
  you to successively select expanding blocks of code so that you can easily select
  any expression in the code by placing the caret somewhere inside it and pressing
  Ctrl+W a few times
• Shrink Selection (Ctrl+Shift+W) – opposite of “Extend Selection”
• Duplicate Text (Ctrl+D) – duplicates selected text if any, otherwise it duplicates current line.
• Comment with Line Comment(Ctrl+/) – comments selected text with // in front of each line. This functionality doesn’t work correct with XML comments and is also provided by Visual Studio.
• Comment with Block Comment (Ctrl+Shift+/) – comments the selected text with /* and */ block.
• Rearrange Code – allows you to rearrange members in your code up, down. It’s also possible to move code in or out of block. Generally this is a useful feature, but it doesn’t support moving regions.
• Paste – Clipboard history.

Templates

Templates in ReSharper are one big disappointment in comparison with CodeRush. Although
it provides around 50 live templates (this is a total count – for all languages)
and around 30 surround templates (this is total count – for all languages) I find
it pretty poor. Many of those are pretty useless. The only good point about templates
is they’re easy to add and  edit. However once you start adding new templates
you quickly figure out that your options are limited, which is another minus regarding
the templates.

Other posts in the series

Part 1 – Installation & First-time Configuration
Part 2 – Coding Assistance & Templates
Part 3 – Refactoring
Part 4 – Navigation
Part 5 – Code Inspection
Part 6 – Unit Tests
Part 7 – Performance & Memory Consumption
Part 8 – Ease of Use
Part 9 – Extensibility
Part 10 – Other Cool Features
Part 11 – Final Thoughts

Advertisement