For the past week or so I’ve gone without any Visual Studio enhancements. No ReSharper. No CodeRush. I knew that I didn’t leverage even a fraction of what these tools offer so I wanted to find out what I would miss.

Here’s what I’m missing the most. In no particular order.

1. Detection of errors before I compile.

2. Shortcut for moving a class to its own file.

   I like to build up features in the same file (for speed) and then refactor the classes into their own files later. A tedius process of copy/paste.

3. A rename function that is smart enough to rename the file as well.

4. Unit Test debugger.

   I don’t mind running tests in the NUnit GUI, it even feels faster sometimes, but I miss the ability to step into my tests. I use this feature a lot for exploring APIs.

5. Ability to generate constructors.

   Especially useful for creating custom exceptions where you want to implement all of the base constructors.

6. Fast code snippets.

   Visual Studio’s built in snippets are functional, but slow to access compared to the alternatives so I ended up not using them. I definitely prefer CodeRush’s snippets.