CodeRush v1.1.4 Review

By Andrew Sutton

Introduction

Developer Express currently have v1.1.4 of CodeRush available for download. Currently CodeRush costs around $250 and there is a 60 days money back guarantee. There is a fully functional evaluation download available from the CodeRush Download Page. This appears to be fully functional until a set date when some of the features are deactivated. CodeRush is one of those products that is categorised under the generic title of productivity tools. It comes as a Visual Studio (VS) add-in and installs many new features into VS. It works for both C# and VB.NET.

Installation

The download was just over 6MB. I was able to register as a user of CodeRush as a Microsoft VB MVP. I had to register an email address and I received a login ID and password. As a registered user I could download CodeRush using Developer Express’s MyDevExpress download web application. The installation took less than 5 minutes. I opted to update both my 2002 & 2003 VS installations. The installation detected that I had 2003 open and prompted me to close it.

When I fired VS up for the first time after the installation there was a new menu called devExpress available on the menu bar of VS.

Use

CodeRush is configured via the devExpress, Options screen. There are three modes you can run CodeRush in, New User, Advanced and Expert. The difference is that certain options are hidden from you in the more basic modes. I’d advise you start off in New User mode, just until you get a feel for the product.

All CodeRush features are created as Plug-Ins. It is possible to create your own Plug-Ins that add to CodeRush’s feature list. Some CodeRush plug-ins are listed on the CodeRush Community web page.

There are a far too many features CodeRush has to offer to list them all this review so I will highlight a few of my favourites.

Visualisation Tools

• Regions. You can colour code collapsed and expanded regions. This makes it much easy to quickly identify which code is expanded and collapsed.
• Flow Break Icons. These are icons that appear at the end of lines that contain flow break key words like Exit For, Return etc. When you click on the icon a circle appears in the code window that shrinks to a point centred on the next line that will be executed.
• Structural Highlighting. This displays vertical lines in the code window that match up code blocks. E.g. If .. Else .. End If. Especially useful when a code block takes up more room than can be displayed on the screen at once. You can configure the colour of the line for each type of code block.

Advanced Selection Tools

• Select Embedding. This feature provides an extra entry, when you right click on a selection in the code window, called Embed Selection. This brings up a sub menu with a list of options for embedding code around the highlighting code. It comes with configured entries for things like Try..Catch, #Region..#EndRegion but you can also add your own entries.

Navigation

• Markers. Markers are similar to Bookmarks but work in a slightly different way. Markers are stack based which means you always navigate back to the last marker added. Markers can also be placed at row, column points.

Templates

Templates are a way of associating key press shortcuts to insert code into the code window. There are many pre-generated templates that come with CodeRush. The template insertion is activated by a shortcut activation key. The default shortcut activation key is the SPACE BAR. E.g. pressing c<SPACE BAR> activates the class and constructor template which inserts the following code at the cursor:

Public Class ClassName

Public Sub New()

End Sub

End Class

The main problem with templates is remembering all the shortcut codes.

You can, of course, also create your own templates.

Conclusion

CodeRush has many features that really do enhance your productivity with VS. The help that comes with CodeRush is pretty comprehensive and has, so far, enabled me to solve most of my queries. There are CodeRush Newsgroups available for posting questions on and these I have found to be very responsive.

My initial reaction is to give CodeRush 4/5 although I might well have to re-evaluate this upwards once I really get to grips with all the functionality. One of CodeRush’s problems is that there are so many options it is a little daunting to use it to start with.

I shall certainly be using it as a default VS add-in for the time being and I look forward to seeing how I get on with it in the next few weeks.