ReSharper Unified Installer. Why?

Alexey Totin

The ReSharper 9 release introduced a special ReSharper Ultimate bundle. In addition to ReSharper and ReSharper C++, this bundle includes our other JetBrains .NET products: dotCover, dotTrace, dotMemory, and dotPeek.

What made this bundle possible? In the pre-Ultimate era, customers using multiple JetBrains .NET tools together experienced serious performance issues. For ReSharper 9, we worked on a ‘shared platform’ to eliminate this performance overhead. This decision also led to the following:

• All .NET products are now released on the same day.

• ReSharper 9 and other shared-platform tools cannot be installed side-by-side with their predecessors onto the same Visual Studio instance. For example, after you installed dotCover 3.0 with switched on VS integration, you would find ReSharper 8 uninstalled. Unpleasant, but unfortunately inevitable.

• Now, there is only one unified installer for all JetBrains .NET products. Whether you get ReSharper Ultimate, ReSharper, dotTrace, dotMemory, or dotCover, you will download the same installer (though it has different names depending on the product).

The latter consequence, in turn, created another concern. Even if the downloaded installer implies the installation of a single product (say, dotCover), it will contain installation options for our entire .NET product lineup.

You may ask? “What are all these options for? What can/should I install?“. Of course, you can select just the tool you’re interested in and skip everything from the Available Products section. However, we recommend that you try installing all. Now let us explain why:

1. No problems with trial licenses
   Having all these Available Products in the installer doesn’t mean you have licenses to the corresponding tools. In fact, the installer is absolutely unaware of this as applying a license is a post-installation step.
   Nevertheless, even if you don’t have a license to a particular tool, that’s OK, as any installed tool automatically gets a trial license. So, you’ll have from 5 to 10 days to give it a try.
2. No annoying license notifications
   Even after the trial license expires, it will NOT bother you with notifications when Visual Studio starts up (this was really annoying in previous versions). The notification will be shown only in case of an explicit action, e.g. after you try to run profiling with an expired dotTrace license.
3. More comprehensive development experience 
   This is a good opportunity to try all of the tools and decide whether you need each one in your work. For example, many developers neglect profiling their apps, not realizing that one profiling session may be all that’s needed to reveal a severe yet easily fixable bottleneck.
   Our vision of ReSharper Ultimate is that of a single product that covers most needs a .NET developer may have, rather than a set of separate products. In line with this vision, in ReSharper 9 we discarded separate .NET tool menus. Now, ReSharper’s menu is the only starting point for all your activities with all JetBrains .NET tools:
   
   Of course, this is just the beginning and we plan to make this integration even deeper.
4. Almost no performance penalties
   As we mentioned earlier, it doesn’t matter how many JetBrains .NET tools are currently installed in your Visual Studio. Thanks to the shared platform, there are virtually no performance costs. Nevertheless, if you don’t need a particular tool for your project, you can reduce its impact to zero by disabling it in ReSharper’s Products and Features:
   

We hope this post answers most of the questions you may have had about the installer. If not, please post them in the comments below. Thanks!

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