Starting from ReSharper 2019.3, we added more colors settings for highlighting code from Tools | Options | Fonts and Colors to adjust code highlighting more precisely. Let’s take a look at the new color options that are available! Before getting started, make sure ReSharper's Color Identifiers settings is enabled. You'll see the setting under ReSharper | Options | Code Inspection | Settings. (more…)

A coding style is a way to consistently write code in a particular way. Style is all about readability. A good style should make it smooth, easy, and pleasant for you and others to read and modify. Code that’s easy to read is more maintainable and helps reduce errors. Everyone has a coding style that they fine tune throughout their coding careers. Some developers spend years working on getting their style just perfect. Most of the time, we work on a team, so our style has to blend in with the overall style of the team we’re on as well. Fortunately for us, we can use Rider to work on perfect

With the new Rider 2019.1 EAP builds, we bring more goodies to the editor that help us navigating and understanding our code much faster. This includes the popular breadcrumbs navigation, structural navigation originally introduced with ReSharper, revised summary and parameter info tooltips as well as some fixes for Alt-Enter menu, which is all too precious. Let's see... (more…)

When editing code in the latest builds of ReSharper 2018.3 EAP and Rider 2018.3 EAP,  the inline parameter hints for C# and VB.NET are something you will notice immediately. Let's see how this new feature makes code more readable, and how we can configure it. What are inline parameter hints? When using a literal in a method call, ReSharper and Rider will annotate those with the name of the parameter. This makes it much easier to understand what their value represents. For example, we can see that the string literal "\\s" here, represents the pattern of a regular expression: When ho

While debugging, we often have to work with lots of information. We have the autos, locals and watches tool window to look at, code in our editor, ... This overdose of information and switching between looking at code and at tool windows often messes with the mental context of the debugging session in our brains. No more! With ReSharper 2017.3 EAP, we are proud to bring one of Rider's features into Visual Studio: local variables, current line expressions and function returns are now displayed inside the editor! On top of that, we're adding searchable DataTips! (more…)

Rider 2017.2 EAP builds come with a series of new features and improvements around F#, such as code folding, commenting with block comment, debugger expression evaluation on hover, support for XML docs in tooltips and more! Many visible improvements were made, as well as "invisible" ones. For example, we've updated performance of parsing and working with the F# FCS - an optimization we are contributing back to the Visual F# compiler and tools so others can benefit from it, too. Now let's look at the more visible things! (more…)

We've all been there. Investigating a bug, making some code changes, then finding that these changes don't fix the bug. Rinse, repeat, and two hours later we realize that first attempt needed just a little tweak. How can we roll back to it if we did not commit it to Git or Mercurial? How can we roll back any change we made to the code base between source control commits? Undo only goes so far... In JetBrains Rider, there's a solution to that: Local History. It's a real-time, local version control that keeps track of changes we make to our code base. What is Local History? When we're "in

Usually, coding and review tasks are logged in an issue tracker like YouTrack, JIRA or Visual Studio Team Services, all systems that can be connected to from within JetBrains Rider. But what with those typical TODO comments? Do they go into the issue tracker? Or should we simply annotate our code with short comments?  Instead of starting a religious discussion, let's look at how we can work with TODO's in our code and IDE to describe these small, code-specific tasks. (more…)

A new Rider EAP build is available for download! In this Rider EAP 21, we've fixed a number of bugs, bundled the TFS plugin to make working with TFS and VSTS easier, added detection of existing file indents for editing, added highlighting in XML doc comments, improved options pages for inspections and the NuGet client, and... added F# language support! Let's go over what's new and what this all means. (more…)

Just like ReSharper, Rider supports language injections. In almost every project there are cases where we want to (or have to) embed a piece of code in a string literal. For example, pieces of HTML inside a JavaScript string, or a quick JSON fragment inside a C# string. Let's see how they work. Note: In this blog post, we'll look at some of the basics of language injections. They work similar in both Rider and ReSharper - check this deep-dive post on language injections in ReSharper to learn more. Mark as injected language Like all good things in Rider, Alt+Enter is where it starts. In

Today, I'd like to introduce you to Smart Paste, a "little big feature" in Rider (as well as in ReSharper). It ensures the right escaping in string literals that are copy/pasted. For example, consider pasting The "Name" field is required into var error = "". We would paste the string, then move to both " characters and escape them with \", making sure there are no syntax errors. Rider helps us out here with a quick-fix that can escape illegal characters for us! Smart paste works in C#, VB.NET, JavaScript, XML, XAML and HTML files, and suggests escaping values upon paste. (more…)