If I turn off ReSharper 5's IntelliSense, what am I missing?

Question

During my trial of ReSharper 5, I noticed its version of IntelliSense falls behind Visual Studio 2010's in three ways that were key to me:

1. ReSharper doesn't support IntelliSense in the "QuickWatch..." debugger utility.
2. ReSharper's IntelliSense seems to break down for me in .aspx files between the <%= %> tags.
3. I couldn't find a way to get a listing of properties within an object initializer block. (VS does this if you hit the space key.)

Thankfully ReSharper lets you use Visual Studio IntelliSense alongside its other great features. Am I missing out on anything great by not using ReSharper's IntelliSense?

Folkmoot

Answer 1

Well you're losing quite a bit. Here are some quick facts about ReSharper code completion: http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/webhelp/Coding_Assistance__Code_Completion.html

Smart Completion (Ctrl+Shift+Space in IntelliJ IDEA keymap) is especially useful because in common scenarios it gives you a narrow selection of symbols that you most likely want to complete, and in some cases acts as a shortcut to code generation features

By the way, Smart Completion is the kind of completion that you should use with object initializers: www.jetbrains.com/resharper/webhelp/Coding_Assistance__Code_Completion__Smart.html#object_initializers

As for completion within the <%= %> pair, this should work fine. Please let us know what exactly went wrong by submitting an issue to youtrack.jetbrains.net/issues/RSRP Thanks!

P.S. I work at JetBrains

Vociferation

Ah, okay. Ctrl+Alt+Space gave me object initializer options, which I'll try to re-map to a more wrist friendly combo. It would be nice if it did this automatically like VS. I will see if I can isolate why completion between <%= and %> works sometimes and others does not, but you're right, it now works for most cases. That missing QuickWatch... functionality can be a killer when you need it though. I don't suppose there is any hope for this being fixed for VS 2010? Thanks! – Folkmoot

Unfortunately we can't make any improvements in QuickWatch support in ReSharper 5.x We hope to get back to this again for Resharper 6.x, and it would really help if you report a feature request and possibly get people vote for it. – Vociferation

Answer 2

A five minute comparison I'd say that ReSharper's gives you a bit of help in the typing.

So if you have a method that's A(int a, int b) and you hit ctrl+space when you select A it will add (), will place you in the middle of the brackets and will show you the information about the method. Other than that you're probably not missing much.

For me that is quite helpful, but if you're having trouble doing ASP.NET and those are known bugs / limitations its always best to pick the best tool for the job.

Sod

Answer 3

Personally I turn it off. It is annoying and slows me down. Here is a prime example:

Thaxton

Answer 4

No you're not missing much apart from a test runner that supports NUnit. I've had the same problem and also (rather worryingly), hideous performance. I tend to use the productivity power tools extension and the native refactor stuff instead. Info here:

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/d0d33361-18e2-46c0-8ff2-4adea1e34fef

R# also does stuff which I plainly do not want to do and my code ends up littered with commented resharper hints.

Marrow

The OP's not asking about R# in general, only about the Intellisense feature of R#... – Chomp

Right... and I definitely like some of the slick features that R# has: unit testing support, code hints, ASP.NET MVC navigational help, etc. Fortunately you can turn off IntelliSense and still get these. I'm still not convinced to buy quite yet though. – Folkmoot

Chris, that's probably because you've not configured it to do what you want. Also regarding the performance, can you be more specific? – Asiaasian

It's default configuration. The intellisense + productivity power tools is almost as good without the performance kick in the face. More specifically with R# performance. I have a good workstation: NEW Quad 2.4 Xeon, 12Gb RAM, Decent 256Gb SSD, ATI FireMV card, win7 X64. Our project is BIG ~ 500KLOC. It simply locks up every time you hit a key. I shouldn't be able to type faster than a machine with 9.6GHz of CPU power can argue with resharper and draw it on the screen. R# is entirely built with O(log N) data structures I'm sure. – Marrow

Did you have solution-wide analysis on? Once I turned that off, I haven't seen any performance issues. I agree that the IntelliSense hasn't knocked my socks off, but every day of the trial I'm finding more and more things to like. Too bad the trial isn't 60 days-- I'm undecided right now, but if the trend continues, I'd be hooked by then. – Folkmoot

Answer 5

I find the CompleteCodeSmart functionality something I use frequently and save me alot of typing.

Ottavia