JustCode vs. ReSharper

[Bent]

First of all, I'd like to congratulate you on your new product.

I've been using ReSharper for some years now, and in that time I have tried out some competitors as well, none of which could compare with the features provided from ReSharper.

JustCode has a lot of potential, but I believe the competition will be very tough looking at ReSharper 5.0 just around the corner, which I've been EAP'ing for some time now.

I must admit that ReSharper can be a resource hog and slow, but the new version is actually pretty fast. 

What I think is the biggest problem of ReSharper regarding speed, is the amount of code analysis it actually does behind the scenes, most of which JustCode doesn't provide yet. When JustCode becomes a real competitor with ReSharper I'd love to see a performance comparison, which you can't provide at the moment since JustCode really can't do much of that ReSharper does.

What I hope to see is a real competitor to ReSharper, providing the same+ refactorings and major speed improvements. At the moment JustCode is beta, but the fact that it doesn't even support extension methods or ternary operators is not a good sign - these should be basics available in a beta (the tool should understand the fundamentals of the language, which is apparently does not).

One of the great news though is of course JavaScript support - a feature (still?) not supported in ReSharper.

What would be a really nice approach was perhaps to split JustCode into different branches, targeting different languages like:

C#

VB.NET

Mark-up (ASP.NET/HTML/XAML/XML etc.)

JavaScript

etc.

This would give anyone using other tools the ability to remedy missing features of their favorite tool with the ones Telerik provides. Looking at JavaScript, this would be the primary reason for me to choose JustCode

Anyway, I believe there's a lot of hope for a competitor, which I am looking forward to trying out, but for now, I'm sticking with ReSharper...

[Chris]

Hello Kenneth,
Thanks for the honest feedback. We really appreciate it.

First about the extensions methods and the ternary operators - actually we do support them. As I said we've been dogfooding JustCode in all of our teams and we've tested it against several large open source projects. And we've tested it against a lot of extension methods and ternary operators.

Unfortunately due to some language peculiarities we still can't be sure whether we support the languages to their full extent. But that's why we release JustCode as Beta after all. I hope that thanks to you and all the people who decide to try JustCode we'll be able to fix all the reported problems in the next 1-2 months.

I also hope that during the next months you'll be pleasantly surprised by the number of features that we're about to implement.

Honestly, we still haven't counted our refactorings against the competitors'. A lot of the competitors' refactorings that we've tested and especially those which operate on a global scope just break the code under some conditions. Well, they say "we may break the code" and at least it's something but it's not a real solution, especially when they lack good solution-wide analysis.

So, what we'll try to do is to keep our solution-wide code analysis fast and at the same time introduce more and more features without compromising the speed.
We'd really like to hear what you want to see implemented next in JustCode and I guarantee it will go straight to our product backlog.

Thanks in advance for helping us shape up the future of JustCode.

Regards,

Chris
the Telerik team

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[Bent]

Thank you for your reply - it's always nice to actually being heard :)

Regarding your statement about actual support for the two basic features i mentioned, I must admit that this proves the product to be more in an alpha state, rather than beta. Of course, I'm not the one to judge how you choose to do your releases, but when I hear the word 'beta' I assume fundamental language support.

Now, your approach to resolving the speed issue hitting many competitors, seems very promising, but again, I believe it's just a matter of time until the same problems arise with your approach, when the number of refactorings and analysis increase to the same amount as fx. ReSharper. Solution-wide analysis and refactoring does not seem like a simple task, but hopefully your approach at least is "better".

As you can probably tell, I'm already a big fan of ReSharper, so perhaps JustCode is not the right product for me at the moment (at least not at the current state), which leads me to my point in my previous post - why not make it possible for people like me to choose the branch of tools that I need? I'm really in need of a great JavaScript refactoring and analysis tool, which I strongly believe you can provide, but I can't use just that feature of JustCode (or can I?). Perhaps it just need to be a setting for the tool.

I can understand that saying A also means saying B (can you say that in English?), and to be competitive, all facets of .NET development must be addressed. What I fear is just that everything of all worlds can't be satisfied, resulting in a overall lacking products. I hope to be wrong :)

Now, for some more concrete feedback

Solution-wide analysis. Is there any way to find code similarities (code-smells), duplicate code and use of bad practices according to best practice? I'm often in the situation where I know of multiple uses of a particular piece of code (same overwritten/interface implementation etc.), but I'm always stuck doing the refactoring myself. Some sort of global "Extract similar methods to superclass" or something like that would be a great enhancement.

Visual Studio keyboard mapping. I don't know if there's any way to solve this issue, but whenever I install a tool that integrates into VS and sets mappings, my own custom hotkey mappings are overwritten. Especially CTRL+W, which I've mapped to File.Close, seems to be reset to Edit.SelectCurrentWord, which is completely useless. JustCode however seems to change this shortcut to ExpandSelection (still completely useless).

Is there any way for JustCode to respect custom shortkeys?

Until next time :)

[Chris]

Hi Kenneth,

> I'm really in need of a great JavaScript refactoring and analysis tool, which I strongly believe you can provide, but I can't use just that feature of JustCode (or can I?). Perhaps it just need to be a setting for the tool.

Actually you can. You can go to the JustCode Options and disable the code analysis for the languages which you don't need (JustCode Options / Code Analysis / General). Moreover all of the JustCode modules are based on MEF (Microsoft Extensibility Framework) and they're dynamically loaded on startup. For example if you find a given feature useless (e.g. Expand Selection), you can go to C:\Program Files\Telerik\JustCode\Libraries\Extensions and delete the "Telerik.JustCode.CodeNavigation.ExpandSelection.dll" assembly from there.

> What I fear is just that everything of all worlds can't be satisfied, resulting in a overall lacking products. I hope to be wrong :)

At least we'll try to do our best to prove you wrong. :)

> Solution-wide analysis. Is there any way to find code similarities (code-smells), duplicate code and use of bad practices according to best practice?

Currently JustCode finds duplicate if-else statements and unreachable code. Of course there's a lot more to be done in this area and there're already some features planned for the next few months.

> Visual Studio keyboard mapping. I don't know if there's any way to solve this issue, but whenever I install a tool that integrates into VS and sets mappings, my own custom hotkey mappings are overwritten.

I feel your pain. I also hate tools which change the shortcuts to which I've gotten used to. Btw, I've also mapped CTRL + W to file close because I got used to it a long, long time ago when I used Allaire's HomeSite. Unfortunately we can't predict all the shortcuts which people could possibly use. What you can do is go to the VS Tools menu / Options / Keyboard, then type "JustCode" in the filter textbox, select the command which takes your shortcut (e.g. JustCode.ExpandSelection), remove the shortcut and probably assign some other shortcut to it.

I hope this information helps.

Best wishes,

Chris
the Telerik team

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Watch a video on how to optimize your support resource searches and check out more tips on the blogs.