I've met a couple of C# devs recently who seem competent and senior in their organizations, but actively resist using refactoring tools - they claim doing it by hand is just as good. My current theory is Resharper + Visual Studio is just unusable. I haven't met any Java programmers who think this. - ThreadSky

emilybache.com • 92 days ago

I've met a couple of C# devs recently who seem competent and senior in their organizations, but actively resist using refactoring tools - they claim doing it by hand is just as good. My current theory is Resharper + Visual Studio is just unusable. I haven't met any Java programmers who think this.

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italkswe.bsky.social•92 days ago

In a weak moment I sometimes suspect that people would rather feel like a Hollywood hacker than an engineer.

lesleylai.info•92 days ago

I've met enough competent people with drastically different opinions and coding styles. Some people still prefer not having auto completion and even syntax highlighting, not to mention refactoring tools. The usability of tools won't attract those people.

emilybache.com•89 days ago

not wanting syntax highlighting seems completely mad to me, but true, there are lots of opinions out there. I was suprised to meet several people with a particular toolset sharing this particular preference though.

jasongorman.bsky.social•92 days ago

Even if they don't use Resharper, the Roslyn compiler has automated refactorings built in. So they could use them in Studio, or VS Code.

IME, it usually means they don't do much refactoring.

ryantk.uk•92 days ago

I refactor my Ruby code continually throughout an average day where tooling is poor. I am happy to copy and paste, search and replace as I please. This text manipulation never felt like the hard part of the job to me?

emilybache.com•89 days ago

Good point, the refactoring IDE tools in Ruby are not brilliant yet Ruby devs are often good at refactoring. But not against tools per se?

ryantk.uk•88 days ago

I think with Ruby being a dynamic language there is less “ceremony” in declaring a new class or method. We don’t need to worry about input/return types so simply typing class or def is not much effort to do manually. As for tooling we have lots but it is mostly terminal based.

hibri.net•92 days ago

Think this because of a lack of practice and knowing what Resharper can do and it does a lot more than refactoring.

mrlythgoe.bsky.social•92 days ago

It sounds like a very smart theory to me.
I'm not sure I'm do much refactoring if I didn't have tools like IntelliJ to help me out.
Without good tools, refactoring can be very laborious and error prone.

acstanding.bsky.social•92 days ago

First thing I would do after installing Resharper is create a keyboard shortcut to toggle it on/off. Enabling for polish towards the end of the process saves so much time. My go-to is Roslynator but many of those analyzers and refactorings have been baked into VS 2022 now.

moke.me•92 days ago

I don't use Resharper with VS because I think it slows down a lot my machine. I prefer using Rider directly.

emilybache.com•89 days ago

yes that's my theory. That they'd be more enthusiastic about refactoring tools generally if they had Rider.

tombuildsstuff.bsky.social•92 days ago

Tooling feels like a factor, I’ve had similar conversations in the past and took away that it was also due to not trusting it (through previous bad experiences/incomplete refactors)

OTOH I’ve found folks using Rider lean on them way more heavily

nerei.net•92 days ago

Hard disagree. imho Re#er refactorings are still better than what VS offers nowadays. I know a lot of Devs who have no idea what the refactorings offered by ReSharper even mean/can do and I'm certain they don't know how to do it manually either..and then there's the issue of not having unit tests

emilybache.com•89 days ago

I'm glad you have good experiences of Resharper + VS! That's encouraging.

asprotunity.com•89 days ago

Last time I used Resharper + Visual Studio was a long ago. At the time, it worked very well. Yet, I was the only one in the organization using it as the lead C# dev was "evaluating" it. Their code was terrible.

ryber.bsky.social•92 days ago

There are java devs like that and they all use tricked out EMacs or VIM

emilybache.com•89 days ago

good point! I havn't met them I guess.

chrisoldwood.bsky.social•89 days ago

Coming from a C++ background where there was virtually no assistance, C# + ReSharper seemed wonderful. And I’ve fully embraced it, but my decisions are all conscious ones. However, I’ve seen others go on auto-pilot:

[2012] Don’t Let Your Tools Pwn You

https://chrisoldwood.blogspot.com/2012/02/dont-let-your-tools-pwn-you.html

laurentkempe.com•92 days ago

I can ensure that my entire team utilizes refactoring tools, now with #Rider instead of ReSharper + Visual Studio. I've never encountered such resistance. What I've observed are developers who are unaware of the full capabilities of their IDE and tools.

emilybache.com•89 days ago

I think Rider might just be a smoother experience and that makes all the difference. I also meet a lot of devs who don't know what their tools are capable of, but that didn't seem to be the case with these people.

laurentkempe.com•89 days ago

It might be, but people were complaining already in the past about the performance of VS + R#, which was never a real problem for me. I was ok to give up on some performance, even if I never had that feeling, for all the tooling I was getting out of R# which were missing in VS.

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