Resharper presentation

July 25, 2009 17:00
The other day your humble correspondent conducted a two hours training: Resharper 4.5 overview[1].



Here's nice a part of it. It captures 3 routine tasks we developers do extremely often:
  • Code completion
  • Minor refactorings
  • Moving code

Code Completion.

Resharper provides quite a few features for this small task[2].

1. If you just want complete anything "visible from here" - use Symbol Completion (Ctrl+Space by default) as on the examples below: they capture the moment when the shortcut was just hit.

     

2. But if you really know what you need and don't want to spend too much time going through a big dropdown - use Smart Completion (Ctrl+Alt+Space by default). Look at the example below: the shortcut was just hit and the dropdown contains only items that match CustomerOrder (as ProcessCore takes it as a parameter).



3. If you're going to use a type that is not imported yet, Import Symbol Completion is your friend (Shift+Alt+Space by default). It displays everything that matches a given prefix - that's especially germane if the type name is long... with Resharper, you can just type the capital letters. 

What if you need ListViewVirtualItemsSelectionRangeChangedEventHandler, a .NET type with the longest type name ? 53 characters. Phew! Now look at the example below, it captures the moment when the shortcut was just hit. Marvelous. 



4. If you want to insert brackets, semicolons and other stuff and get directly to the place where you can start typing the next statement - use  Complete Statement (Ctrl+Shift+Enter by default). Say, if you'd type public void Test(int count, string details and hit the shortcut, Resharper will insert the closing parenthesis, put curly brackets and position the caret for you:



Then if, while in the method body, you'd type an expression - say, string name = "foo" and hit the shortcut, Resharper will complete the semicolon and move you to the next line.

Minor Refactorings.

Quite often you need to apply a small local refactoring: invert if statement, replace var with explicit type, check a parameter for null, etc, etc. Resharper calls them context actions and once you step on a place where a context action can be applied, you see a yellow light bulb .

Default shortcut is Alt+Enter - just hit it or click on the bulb to get a handful of refactoring options. Look at the examples below (vertical bold yellow lines represent cursor positions). 



Moving Code.

From time to time, the code needs to be moved around.

One line (or piece of code) might need to be put above the other, xml tags or attributes may need to be reordered. Usually it's done by copying the stuff to the clipboard, removing it and pasting it into the right place.

But I bet you'd like the Resharper way. While standing on the piece you want to move, hit Ctrl+Shift+Alt and use up/down/left/right arrows to move it as you need.




Footnotes.
  1. The slides available here , other than that it was mostly code-n-talk stuff.  
  2. Look at my previous Resharper post for more details on code completion.


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