Jet Brains ReSharper

I have using the ReSharper evaluation and now it has come to crunch to decide whether or not to purchase. I was very impressed with what ReSharper has to offer with all the features that were added to Visual Studio.

I have been using Eclipse for Java development and felt I was switching to a ‘less feature rich IDE’ when moving to Visual Studio when navigating around a large solution. This drove me to evaluate CodeRush and ReSharper.  I felt that the version for CodeRush Xpress for Visual Studio just didn’t cut it.

These were the following ReSharper wins for me:

• Type Hierarchy: This would allow you to view a Hierarchy of classes that implemented / derived from certain classes and interfaces.  The Visual Studio ‘Find All References’ is just too dawn slow!
• Go to Implementation: Allows you to to directly navigate to an implementation of an interface; multiple implementation would pop up showing the ‘Type Hierarchy’.
• File Search: Allows you type part of a filename to locate it in the solution.
• Type Search: Allows you to type part of a type name to find the type.

Well, despite my love for ReSharper I could not justify the purchase with my own cash since ultimately my company would be benefiting from the purchase. In my opinion my company should make the purchase to serve the dozen developers we have to improve the productively levels.

I thought I’d share some alternative add-ins that I have found for Visual Studio 2008 to allow you to get by a little easier.  It’s doesn’t solve everything but if you want to make Visual Studio a little bit more feature rich and tolerable when moving from Eclipse then this is what I recommend.

DPack

DPack is a FREE collection of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and 2005 tools. DPack is designed to greatly increase developer's productivity, automate repetitive processes and expand upon some of Microsoft Visual Studio features.

It provides File Search and Type Search, make sure to change the settings to cache to disk rather than to memory, otherwise you’ll be stuck will the dialog window that collects information about your solution every time you open you solution which can take a few minutes.

Visual Studio PowerCommands

Visual Studio PowerCommands provided various useful commands such as Collapse Projects, Open Containing Folder etc etc. See http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/DF3F0C30-3D37-4E06-9EF8-3BFF3508BE31

Reflector

Reflector allows you to analyse assemblies showing you various implementations of classes and interfaces.  Not a true type hierarchy but combined with RelectorLink it proves to be quite useful.

I would highly recommend ReSharper but I think that the productively improvement it provides should be provided by the company you’re working for rather than yourself. If you’re self employed and/or a contractor then ReSharper will serve you well.

Thanks for reading.!

HttpWebRequest.DefaultMaximumErrorResponseLength

I usually use Google to hunt for solutions to my exceptions but this one proved to be a challenge with regards to the amount of digging that had to be done.

I encountered an issue with a .NET Client receiving a Soap Fault that was greater than 64K. This mean’t that a response stream greater than 64K got truncated and thus this exception.

[System.Xml.XmlException] = {System.Xml.XmlException: Unexpected end of file has occurred. The following elements are not closed: faultstring, soap:Fault, soap:Body, soap:Envelope. Line 2833, position 4.
   at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Throw(Exception e)
   at System.Xml.XmlTextR...

Turns out you can set HttpWebRequest.DefaultMaximumErrorResponseLength=-1 for unlimited in code or the web.config / app.config

  
<system.net>   
    <settings>    
      <httpWebRequest maximumErrorResponseLength="-1"  />    
    </settings>    
  </system.net>

Lets hope with some indexing that this post serves you well!