I can't quite remember what possessed me to do so, but I started testing Resharper recently. A lot of .NET engineers are familiar with Resharper and/or CodeRush/Refactor!. It seems that both products have a loyal following.
So my trial of Resharper just ended. What are my impressions? It's great, actually. Since my trial ended and I haven't purchased the product (more on that later) I've really missed Resharper and it's instant feedback. The product's two best features are live compilation and markers in your code to let you know about tips, suggestions and warnings. There's also a bar along the right side of a code file that shows where in the file there are problems or tips on how to improve your code.
So why didn't I buy the product? I've heard a lot of good things about CodeRush as well and wanted to give their product a try before dropping my hard earned cash on Resharper. I actually saw someone (sorry, can't remember a name) demo CodeRush and Refactor! at last year's Ann Arbor of Day of .NET. I was intrigued by the product. If you haven' seen it the UI for CodeRush is pretty impressive. It includes a lot of animations and effects that are intended to make it easier to visualize things.
So I've started working with CodeRush and Refactor! So far my experience is positive. At first I didn't particularly care for them. Resharper's main advantage is obvious. As soon as you type some code with any of the problems that Resharper can point out you will know. CodeRush isn't quite as approachable in my opinion, despite the animations.
A great feature of CodeRush is CodeRush's much improved version of code templates. As an example, if I wanted to declare and initialize a list of integers I could type nl.i followed by a space to produce List<int> list = new List<int>();. That definitely saves some typing. nl.b would turn into List<bool> list = new List<bool>(). There are verbs such as n (for new instance), p (for property) and then you can apply those to various types. It's really quite slick.
Anyway, my main point wasn't to argue for either of these products. I'm currently undecided about which of the two products I would rather purchase, so I can't really advocate either one of them.
What I'm getting at is that if these kinds of tools can really make developers more productive, why aren't we all using them? On a regular basis I spend $60 on a new video game. For a $60 videogame I would hope to get 20-50 hours of playtime. On the other hand, every single week I spend dozens of hours in Visual Studio .NET. Yet it's much harder to convince myself to spend the $150 on Resharper or the $250 on CodeRush/Refactor! than it is to buy a few video games that I won't spend nearly the same amount of time using.
This seems like a problem, and I'm going to try to fix it. Once I decide which one I like the most I'm going to get myself an actual copy of Resharper or CodeRush and make an investment in making myself more productive. Hopefully it pays off.