Public Virtual Auto-Properties and CodeRush

Since starting to make the move towards utilizing NHibernate in most of my projects I have been a little frustrated by the need to make properties virtual. This is by no means a criticism of NHibernate just the tooling, specifically Visual Studio 2010 and CodeRush. Whilst CodeRush has templates for everything the virtual keyword dosn’t seem to get a look in, fortunately it’s not hard to add support. Thanks to Rory Becker’s article on Creating Virtual Methods I had everything I needed to create the template....

February 11, 2012 · 2 min

Changing code accessibility modifiers quickly

I have two hints today both of them involving changing accessibility modifiers. The first is a feature of CodeRush that I accidentally discovered while testing out the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools the second is a great new feature of Visual Studio 2010. For those who don’t know what I mean by accessibility modifiers, those are the keywords you put before blocks of code that define how that code can be accessed, this is all enforced by the compiler giving you nice compiler error messages if you violate these rules....

October 12, 2010 · 3 min

Finding Code Issues

As programmers we are well known for writing bug free perfectly formed code first time round, as such I don’t really understand why DevExpress implemented the code issues feature… no wait… that should be the other way round. CodeRush has several ways to access the Code Issues user interface, first off there is the thin file overview down the right hand side of the viewport. In the code itself there are handy contextual hints too....

October 1, 2010 · 1 min

Controling Code Outlining with the Keyboard

Code outlining is a feature of supported by Visual Studio and many other editors, MSDN has some good documentation for VS2005, VS2008 and VS2010. If I were asked to explain this as briefly as possible, I would probably say: Code Outlining is the logical partitioning of code in such a way that the user interface, or editor, is able to selectively hide the body of the content (such as a class, struct, enum or method) whilst leaving the signature or some identifying comment visible....

November 3, 2009 · 2 min

Adjusting Selections in CodeRush Xpress

I found this function totally accidentally when I knocked my mouse into a key when something interesting popped up on Twitter. I happened to have a variable selected like so: The key that I knocked was the Number Pad “+” key, and it expanded the selection like this: As any self respecting Systems Administrator would do I wondered if doing exactly the same thing repeatedly would have equal or compound effects....

October 16, 2009 · 2 min

Find Files in CodeRush Xpress

As I mentioned in my previous entry I have started using DevExpress’s CodeRush Xpress. It is a free cut down version of CodeRush that I heard about in an episode of .NET Rocks. I have wanted add something to my Visual Studio development experience and I can’t justify the cost of either Resharper or CodeRush at the moment. There has been quite a bit of discussion about Resharper vs. CodeRush and in my experience most people I have spoken to love one and hate the other....

October 12, 2009 · 2 min