I’ve been using CodeRush for Visual Studio for some time now, but it turns out I had no idea of what it was really capable of…
I was watching some of the GrokTalks I pimped yesterday – in particular Scott Hanselman’s 10 Utilities in 10 Minutes which is an extremely cut down version of his 2005 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List. In both of these he covers CodeRush, saying:
Apparently my enthusiasm for CodeRush has been noticed by a few. It just keeps getting better. However, the best kept secret about CodeRush isn’t all the shiny stuff, it’s the free Extensibility Engine called DxCore that brings VS.NET plugins to the masses.
…and I figured fair enough, I’ll agree with that – I’m using it and I like it. Then I watched his GrokTalk and realised I was just seeing the tip of the iceberg!
You see CodeRush has Code Templates. Obviously I’d seen these in action (because you can’t help but trigger them), but I didn’t realise how extensive (and customisable) they were. Now I can write huge swathes of (clean) code with very little effort.
I love any tool that makes my life easier, and this is one of them!