.NET Answers

I sent out the following tweet last week:

“Where’s the refactor menu option?!  Oh, wait.  This is VB.NET, they don’t have that feature.”

Almost immediately, I got responses.  The most helpful was from @RoryBecker letting me know about CodeRush XPress by Devexpress.com

This tool does way more than I was immediately looking for and it is free.

Instead of just allowing me to promote a block of code to a method it will:

• Add parameters to your methods and update all the calls to that method for you.
• Promote variables to parameters
• Promote local variable to member variables (and rename to your member variable notation, ie _variableName or m_variableName)
• Remove parameters and update all the calls to that method for you
• Combine nested conditionals
• Compress if/then/else to ternary
• Variable declaration help.
• Promote blocks of code to methods
• Convert blocks of code to anonymous methods
• …

The list goes on and on.

And it is all free if you own Visual Studio.

There is, of course, a paid version that does even more. 

The only real downside to a tool like this is that you have to learn a completely new way of programming to be really efficient using it.  But I think that’s a really small price to pay considering the efficiency you’ll receive.

Check it out

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/Visual_Studio_Add-in/CodeRushX/

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