After changing to a dark theme for Visual Studio I needed to make some changes to CodeRush so I could see it clearly. These are my CodeRush settings for use with my slightly modified Son of Obsidian. I hope they help anyone else who’s in the same situation.

Turns out that the default visual settings for CodeRush are not brilliant if you have a dark theme for Visual Studio. For the most part they’re ok, you can just about make them out, but it was a little difficult to see the structural highlighting (the lines that join the start if and end if blocks etc.), and if you set the opacity right up for the icons you can make them out a bit easier, but now if I want to revert to a standard (white) theme for Visual Studio my settings are going to be a bit garish.

Fortunately the DevExpress support team are a friendly and helpful bunch and, after a bit, offered to provide a different set of icons – for light and dark backgrounds. I’m really happy with this as it should make it as easy to see CodeRush with my darker theme as it was with my lighter theme. I also asked Rory Becker if he knew of any settings or configurations that others in the CodeRush community had contributed; he pointed me at his post on CodeRush and dark colour schemes and offered to look around. There were some quick responses, Ian Battersby even had his settings online already, which made it pretty easy to get a head start on the changes I’d need to make.

So now I’ve got my Son of Obsidian CodeRush settings and I’m pretty happy with the results:

C# code

HTML / ASP.NET (with CSS and JavaScript)

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I’ve just written my first CodeRush template and I’m quite pleased with it and myself.

This might sound strange for someone who thinks CodeRush is as awesome as me, but quite honestly the value you get out-of-the-box is just amazing anyway and the support you get from DevExpress is also great, so I’ve not really needed to write my own.

Today though I decided I’d had enough of trying to type Response.Write, usually ending up with responsw. which was dumb, so thought I’d write a simple template to make it easier. First I opened up the Options > Editor > Templates and in the search box looked for “rw”, there wasn’t anything – that’s handy because rw => Response.Write seems obvious to me. I went through a few simple versions creeping up on what I’m now using and the support at DevExpress were again very helpful in confirming that I’d got all the major boxes ticked.

So in the templates I created a new top level folder “Custom” (to make it easy to export my custom templates) and created a new template “rw”, in the expansion I ended up with

Response.Write(«FieldStart»«Link(«?Paste»)»«FieldEnd»«Caret»)

So now when I type rw<space> it will expand into Response.Write([clipboardItem]), if I’ve got something on the clipboard that variable will be pasted into the brackets and remain highlighted, so I can confirm / delete it if needed and it’s linked to the original variable, so renaming one renames all.

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Just recently I’ve been getting a double closing parenthesis when I open one. I know CodeRush has auto completion and that’s been working fine so this threw me a bit.

The problem is quite easy to define, whenever I type the opening bracket of something – for example I type ToString and then the ( I get a double closing )) – this was quite annoying! This was only happening on my home pc where I have Visual Studio 2010. I did a quick Google (amazing how often I say that) and found the answer in a recent Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools update – this has an Automatic Brace Completion option and so does CodeRush so I figured they were both firing and that simply wasn’t necessary and turned off the PPT feature. This required a restart of Visual Studio, which found an update which re-enabled the feature so I had to disable it again and re-restart. Now typing the opening bracket ( just gives me a single closing bracket ).

I have to say that I wasn’t totally happy with my experience, a restart just to turn off the feature? And the setting wasn’t persisted? I’m prepared to accept maybe I did something wrong but if I did I’ve no idea what and so I’m not left with a satisfied feeling about it.

In one of those ‘strange co-incidence’ moments my rss feeds this morning had an item from DevExpress about a completion problem and the summary looked enticing. I was quite surprised, amused, interested in this having suffered the same issue only the night before. I’m not sure which tool offers the better implementation of the feature and asked whether there were any feature comparisons – Rory Becker quickly came back with the options he’s disabled in PPT. I have made the same changes and show them here in the hope it helps someone else.

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Rory Becker mentioned in a recent post CodeRush 101 (by Mehul Harry) that he uses F2 to invoke the Rename Refactoring. That was a forehead slapping moment for me… of course it makes perfect sense F2 should activate the Rename refactoring. I had a look in the Options and it does appear to be there, however it wasn’t active. Fortunately I found the answer on the DevExpress forums, I’ll quote it here, I’m sure no one will mind:

By default the Alternative Bindings are Disabled, select the Alternative Bindings "folder" and Enable it, then all the shortcuts that are in the Alternative Bindings should come to life ;)

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I have updated the CodeRush plug-in ClassCleaner so it runs with the Beta version of the tools for Visual Studio 2010.

Having recently downloaded the new version of Visual Studio I quickly realised that my favourite productivity tools weren’t running. Remembering that every update means recompiling the plug-in against the new binaries I created a new version of the dll for this beta release and am making it available here for anyone else that wants to use it.

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Ok something slightly weird just happened.

I think I’ve updated an old post when I was trying to create a new one. Yeah I know pretty basic mistake to make. I originally posted Class Cleaner updated to DevExpress 2009.3.3 on 15th March, today I opened Windows Live Writer and opened that post so I could quickly make a very similar post (Class Cleaner updated to DevExpress 2009.3.4) all I needed to do was change the title and download link. Seems like I overwrote the old post, so apologies to anyone looking for that post, I don’t seem to have a copy of the post or I would re-re-replace it and create the new post as a new post.

There’s a lesson in being lazy for me! Don’t be lazy, just write the 100 words afresh next time!

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It doesn’t seem long ago since the last update but DevExpress have updated CodeRush/DXCore/Refactor!Pro again, we’re now on 2009.3.4 and, as with any new release, this breaks the CR ClassCleaner plug-in. 

It isn’t particularly hard to recompile the extension against the new dlls, but I’ve done it in the hope that it might help others out there.

Download: CR_ClassCleaner

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It doesn’t seem long ago since the last update but DevExpress have updated CodeRush/DXCore/Refactor!Pro again, we’re now on 2009.3.4 and, as with any new release, this breaks the CR ClassCleaner plug-in. 

It isn’t particularly hard to recompile the extension against the new dlls, but I’ve done it in the hope that it might help others out there.

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DevExpress are working on a test runner that will be built in to CodeRush!

In a recent blog post “CodeRush: Unit Test Runner Preview” early screenshots show the UI changes that show the status of your tests. This looks really cool – at a glance you’ll be able to tell which tests are failing, ignored and which pass.

The test runner already supports VS Test, MbUnit, nUnit and is extensible so any other testing framework can be used.

Scheduled for release later this year I’m looking forward to giving this a go and will be very interested to see how well it stacks up against TestDriven.Net

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I’m a big fan of the CR_ClassCleaner DXCore Plug-in and have just upgraded to the latest release DXCore 9.1.4 which, as usual, caused the Class Cleaner plugin to stop working.

Like I said I love this plug-in, I have mine bound to the standard (CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+L) keystroke that organises my class for me; it puts all the private methods together, public methods, fields etc and organises them with Regions, so it was pretty important to me to fix this.

After grabbing a copy from CodePlex I removed the references for the DexExpress.CodeRush.xxx assemblies and replaced them with the new versions that can be found in C:\Program Files (x86)\DevExpress 2009.1\IDETools\System\DXCore\Bin\ then recompiled and dropped the dll into the plugins folder which can be found at C:\Program Files (x86)\DevExpress 2009.1\IDETools\System\DXCore\BIN\PLUGINS.

I’m running Vista 64bit so the paths may vary depending on what version of Windows you have installed but the gist should be the same.

Anyhow download the updated ClassCleaner binary that works with DXCore 9.1.4 and enjoy

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