This is a time that envy VB developers who have access to DevExpress’
Refactor tool which is far better than the meager refactoring support
available for C# devs in Visual Studio 2005. There was a bunch of
hype around this feature, and it is really useless. I love
Resharper 1.5 for VS 2003, and I can’t wait until it comes out for VS
2005, but until then, I develop EZWeb with a stock VS 2005
install. I made a screen shot of renaming a parameter so you can
see what happens.
Any time you invoke a refactor feature, a modal dialog pops up that
halts your work. Every time takes at least 15 seconds even for
the small solution I have going. This feature was very poorly
designed, and I hope it is improved in a service pack.
Renaming a
method parameter is one of the simplest refactorings. It can’t
affect code other than in that method, so why is there the need to search
every file in the solution? Only code inside that method could
_possibly_ be affected.
Another downer is that the refactorings don’t have shortcut keys
defined by default. You can only get to them with the
mouse. To keep my hands on the keyboard, custom keyboard mappings
are required.
Here’s an area where we still need to catch up with Java IDEs – refactoring.