ReSharper and Visual Studio: Where do We Stand

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Visual Studio keeps evolving, and ReSharper support for the Microsoft IDE is up to the challenge as usual. As a reminder, ReSharper 8.x currently supports a staggering 5 Visual Studio versions: 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2013. It’s only been half a year since we discontinued sales of ReSharper 2.x with support for Visual Studio 2003.

In light of recent Microsoft announcements and our internal decisions we’d like to give you an update on how we stand in regard to supporting different versions of Visual Studio. We have good news and bad news.

Bad news: ReSharper 9 and other .NET tools will not support Visual Studio 2005 and 2008

This was coming for a long time but we kept giving VS2005 and VS2008 one last chance after another. It didn’t help the case that certain recent ReSharper features such as Architecture Tools and Extension Manager weren’t by definition compatible with VS2005 and VS2008. Given the complexity of changes that ReSharper and other .NET tools have been subject to during the ReSharper 9 development cycle, we could have opted to release unstable, untested support for VS2005 and VS2008 but we chose not to. As we stand, we have to stop maintaining support for these releases to focus on up-to-date challenges.

To sum it up, the upcoming releases of ReSharper (including ReSharper 9) and other JetBrains .NET tools will not support Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. Only Visual Studio 2010 and later will be supported further on.

ReSharper 8.2.3, dotTrace 5.5.6, dotMemory 4.1 and dotCover 2.7.2 will become the last releases to support Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. Please keep using these stable releases if you’re staying with Visual Studio 2005 and/or 2008.

Should you or your team mates need to purchase new ReSharper licenses and expect them to work in Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, as a workaround, you’ll be able to buy ReSharper 9 licenses and use them with ReSharper 8.2.3 as we have specifically made sure that this release accepted the new license format.

Good news: ReSharper 9 will support Visual Studio 2015

Therefore, ReSharper 9 will support Visual Studio 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2015.

Following the pattern of ReSharper 8 release, version 9.0 will provide support for Visual Studio 2015 Preview, and further updates will add any necessary improvements required to integrate smoothly into the final VS2015 release. In case you have missed it, the current early ReSharper 9 builds work with Visual Studio 2015 Preview although there are known issues with its dark theme that are going to be fixed shortly.

We’re also close to smoothly integrating ReSharper’s quick-fixes and other Alt+Enter actions with Visual Studio 2015’s quick actions in a single UI:

#ReSharper loves #Roslyn: Feedback?? pic.twitter.com/aEz8Z6mu0H

— Serjic Shkredov (@serjic) November 18, 2014

We expect to write more about ways how ReSharper 9 is going to work in Visual Studio 2015, so stay tuned.

More good news: Both ReSharper 8 and 9 integrate with Visual Studio Community 2013

Microsoft has recently released the (conditionally) free Community edition of Visual Studio 2013 that totally beats Visual Studio Express by supporting extensions. Immediately we were faced with questions whether ReSharper would work in the Community edition. The answer is yes, both ReSharper 8 and ReSharper 9 do integrate into Visual Studio Community 2013.

The next question we faced in this regard was whether ReSharper would introduce a free edition as well. Well, we’re not planning to provide a special free edition. This is not necessary however. Similar to Visual Studio Community that is only available to specific groups of customers (see Channel 9 Q&A for details), ReSharper is also available for free to multiple groups including Microsoft MVPs (along with other JetBrains .NET tools and WebStorm), students and teachers (along with all other JetBrains products), as well as faculty members and trainers for use in classroom environments. Additionally, startup companies can enjoy a 50% startup discount on all JetBrains tools.

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