If you haven't used Resharper before, then this guide is for you. In this guide, I'm going to give a brief overview of Resharper, what benefits it can give you and an explanation as to whether it's worth the money or not.

What is ReSharper?

ReSharper is a refactoring and productively plug-in for Visual Studio. Resharper has a number of nifty features that will make you more productive while writing code within Visual Studio. Visual Studio is a commercial product that is not cheap. In a perfect world, a lot of these refactoring should have been built into Visual Studio. Needing to spend more money to use Visual Studio like a boss is annoying, however, the money saved in productivity is worth it. I've been using Resharper for about 7 years. Resharper is that handy, I use it every single time I write code. In fact, I would struggle to use Visual Studio without it now 🤪

Out-of-the-box, Visual Studio is still a bit clunky when it comes to navigating code, renaming properties, quickly debugging a unit test and a number of other things. Resharper's aim is to remove this clunkiness. Resharper allows you to work more productively and quicker. For a rough list of things you can do with ReSharper, Jet brains have produced this cheat sheet of features. As you can see it provide slots of useful feature.

If you're worried that Resharper has a steep learning curve and it's just another extra thing to learn then don't. You can simply install it and then use it as you go. Resharper tools can be accessed through a context menu, or via keyboard shortcuts. Simply click Alt + Enter on any line of code to see the Resharper action list

How much does ReSharper cost?

The Resharper licensing model has definitely got a lot more complex over the years. Nowadays, there are several bundles you can buy. Resharper basic, Resharper ultimate, and do not forget Resharper with all JetBrains products. The amount you pay per year also varies based on how long you've had a license (if you keep subscribing the costs go down). I use the Resharper normal license and at the time of writing the cost is $239 per year.

Is Resharper Too Expensive

Many companies and developers argue that Resharper costs too much. That is definitely a question that you'll have to decide for yourself. In terms of time-saving, Resharper can easily save you, at a conservative guess, say 10 minutes a day, which over a year totals nearly 50 hours.

I've spent countless hours over my career refactoring projects for clients, before and after I started using Resharper. I remember working on a web forms project for a company. My boss at the time wanted all the namespaces, assembly etc.. updated to reflect a change in the companies name. I think the process took just over 2 days in total because as soon as I started changing names, I ended up with thousands of compile errors... that was a bad day.

Resharper comes with a more powerful global renaming feature compared to the default Visual Studio one. If I rename something, ReSharper will still refactor all the same thing as vanilla Visual Studio, plus it will also refactor views and comments. I've done some similar global renaming since I started using Resharper and I've managed to get it done within 10-20 minutes. 2 days and lots of frustration whittled down to 30 minutes, which makes me happy 😊

Another time-saver is the global auto-remove unused namespaces feature. One company I worked in, didn't want you to check any classes that contained an unused using statement (pain in the bum), if you did it failed the build. Without Resharper, that is a very tedious goal to aim for as it takes a lot of trial and error with the build server to get things working 😢

Is ReSharper worth the money... the choice is yours!

I guess this review is pretty biased as I've been using Resharper for many years and I've never looked back. You can start to use Resharper as soon as you install it. With a little bit of extra conscious effort to learn a few extra shortcuts, your workflow will get faster and faster, you will become a coding legend! So, if you're working with Visual Studio for long periods of time, Resharper pretty much pays for itself. Sure it would be great if Microsoft simply brought Jetbrains and integrated Resharper into Visual Studio but that is not an option currently.

A Visual Studio license isn't cheap in the first place and no one wants to pay extra costs. If you use Visual Studio and you're committed to using .NET, paying a little extra to ensure your code is written to a higher standard and makes your life more enjoyable is a small price to me. I personally value my time, so Resharper is a no-brainer for me. Happy Coding 🤘