I wanted to hold off writing this post, because I wanted to be impartial to the product as possible. However, when I first installed Telerik’s JustCode, I instantly knew that this was the productivity enhancement tool for me.
Let me back up a little, over the years I have given ReSharper and CodeRush more than enough latitude to impress me and after using them for 3 months or more at a time I always end up just uninstalling them. And I constantly repeated this process over and over again, start with naked Visual Studio, get antsy want to try something new install ReSharper, get fed up, uninstall, install CodeRush, get fed up, uninstall, repeat.
I probably repeated this process countless times over the past 5 years, and each time I got more and more fed up and discouraged that the best productivity tool was my fingers, mouse, and naked Visual Studio. However that all changed the day I realized that Telerik was creating a competing productivity tool which seemed to solve my major issues with ReSharper and CodeRush, namely:
- Performance, JustCode doesn’t slow down the startup process of Visual Studio, and it doesn’t slow down the performance of Visual Studio while using it.
- There are no annoying pop-ups that you can’t get rid of. (mainly CodeRush)
- They don’t try to override everything in Visual Studio, even things that work perfectly fine. (mainly ReSharper)
- The power options aren’t hidden way behind obscure keyboard commands.
The first 3 points above are superficial and hard to prove in a blog post. However the 4 point is very easy to explain. My problem with CodeRush and ReSharper is that unless you had inside knowledge or a ton of time to spend learning all the ins and outs of the software you pretty much started and stayed at a disadvantage. Just to be clear, I have spent countless hours watching the video's, reading blogs, and slowly finding all the ins and outs of each productivity tool, and to be honest it shouldn't be this hard. And I should following up to saying it doesn't have to be this hard.
The instant productivity is apparent day-one, with JustCode, if you have absolutely no time to learn the ins and outs or the keyword shortcuts or you just don’t care, you don’t have to worry because every option available to you for the specific piece of code is available in a context menu that shows up when you hover over the a relative piece of code:
These different letters that show up are essentially your best friend, and they stand for:
- C – Create, for generating and creating related code.
- R – Refactor for refactoring the current code.
- N – Navigating the project.
- T – Testing
Under each of these menus is a context sensitive menu for all the options available to you to create, refactor, navigate, and sometimes test your code that you are hovering over. All this being said, if you have the time and the inclination to learn the keyboard commands, you should, because it just adds a speed component to the same productivity you have by clicking around with the mouse.
The other great thing about the JustCode approach is that it is not totally in your face always reminding you that you are running JustCode such as CodeRush and ReSharper do. Maybe this is a bad marketing decision to not constantly remind the customer of the product they are using, but to me the out of the way approach of JustCode is a positive bonus.
JustCode is essentially my friend that only pops up and says "I can help you out with that problem" when I request the help, instead of the annoying friend that is always hanging around reminding you they are there and interjecting unhelpful non-sense when you don’t need their help. Just like Clippy did in Microsoft Office.
tl;dr
I cannot say enough good things about Telerik’s JustCode. If you want a comprehensive productivity tool for coding with Visual Studio that stays out of your way until you ask for its help then JustCode is just the tool for you and it will make just coding a pleasurable experience. (sorry about the play on the word just)
You can download a free trial version from here: http://www.telerik.com/account/your-products/trial-product-versions/trial-single-download.aspx?pmvid=0&pid=717
Try it, you won’t be disappointed.