Ben's Blog A place to share my thoughts

Roslynator and Intellicode

I have been experimenting with Resharper. It’s my first time using it (with VS Professional 2017), and have concluded that it’s quite a remarkable piece of software with an incredible number of features. Using resharper is a bit like having an opinionated buddy constantly looking at your code and providing you with useful hints, whilst automating and providing shortcuts to some of the more tedious jobs i.e. extracting code into a new method.

Despite the positives and everything that resharper can offer, reading online many users state that many of the features resharper brings are now available in Visual Studio. Furthermore, from my own experience, resharper clearly has some performance issue. The stuttering and the additional loading times have convinced me that once my 1 month trial runs out I will go back to vanilla Visual Studio.

This did, however, help me identify a few things that I wish VS could do for me. I started researching additional tools and extensions and have come across two new addins which have made VS an absolute joy to work with:

Roslynator – “A collection of 500+ analyzers, refactorings and fixes for C#, powered by Roslyn“

Intellicode – “IntelliCode is a set of AI-assisted capabilities that improve developer productivity with features like contextual IntelliSense, inference and enforcement for code styles, and focused reviews for your pull requests (PRs.)” Both are incredible in their own right. Roslynator plays the opinionated buddy role and provides you with advice on how to make your code cleaner, along with useful refactoring tools. Intellicode provides the best intellisense that I have ever used. The intellisense is built from the analysis of “2000 GitHub repos that each have more than 100 stars”. I would strongly recommend VS users to check out the links! Once I’ve played with both a little more, I will certainly be sharing this with the rest of the team!

Both are incredible in their own right. Roslynator plays the opinionated buddy role and provides you with advice on how to make your code cleaner, along with useful refactoring tools. Intellicode provides the best intellisense that I have ever used. The intellisense is built from the analysis of “2000 GitHub repos that each have more than 100 stars”. I would strongly recommend VS users to check out the links! Once I’ve played with both a little more, I will certainly be sharing this with the rest of the team!