--- title: "[Tool] The long awaited Resharper - is VB.Net left behind again?" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/14/tool-the-long-awaited-resharper-is-vbnet-left-behind-again.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/14/tool-the-long-awaited-resharper-is-vbnet-left-behind-again.html" published: "2004-02-14T15:25:00" updated: "2004-02-14T15:25:00" tags: [] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "I've raved about IntelliJ IDEA before and I still hold that this is the best usability oriented editor I've seen anywhere. Now, the same folks who brought you this IDE have created an add-in for VS.Net that will…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # \[Tool\] The long awaited Resharper - is VB.Net left behind again? By Roy Osherove February 14, 2004 **Historical article** · Originally published February 14, 2004; technical details may be outdated. I've raved about IntelliJ IDEA before and I still hold that this is the best usability oriented editor I've seen anywhere. Now, the same folks who brought you this IDE have created an add-in for VS.Net that will eventually give .Net developers what Java developers have had for a long time: good intelligent coding and editing usability with amazing refactoring support: [Resharper](http://www.jetbrains.net/resharper) (user and password are “eapuser“). The Add-in is still in Alpha state but can be freely downloaded using an early access program. I've already found it very very good (although a lot of features are still lacking).[Look here](http://www.hutteman.com/weblog/2004/02/14-163.html) for a review of what's currently there. One thing that bothers me is this: The add-in only works for C#. When I open a project in VB.Net I get only two features available to me and the others are disabled. I'm not sure if this is due to the alpha state of the add-in or due to the fact that VB.Net is not going to be part of this functionality. If it's not going to be part of it, it's not going to be the first refactoring add-in that does this. Xtreme Simplicity's [C# Refactory](http://www.xtreme-simplicity.net/CSharpRefactory.html)(you can guess by the name already) is specifically designed for C# as well. There are **no products** that add refactoring functionality to VB.Net, but there should be. Why is this the case? Well, here's an interesting tidbit any CEO can understand: the first company that adds refactoring support to VB.Net will make lots of money. Can you grok that? now please go and provide us “morts“ with this functionality. I've already contacted the company that I believe should be the most likely candidate: [](http://www.axtools.com/)[AXTools](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/14/www.axtools.com). Their CodeSmart add-in already provides lots of great productivity enhancements, and refactoring support would just be another great bit to add to that. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/