Through Kim's blog, I've found out that CodeRush and Refactor 2.0 have finally been released. You can catch the scoop and the immediate download links on the CodeRush blog (as well as some installation notes here).

But the most important thing here is that they've also released a short video showing some of the new features. The main interesting feature is the "Discoverability panel" which shows you the shortcuts you can use at each and every step while inside the coding window. This is wonderful, and I can certainly see this being a very big help for people in making the first (and advanced ) steps with CodeRush.

In fact, that panel really feels like it should have been implemented via some special "Intellisense" list (like Resharper does) because it practically changes on every letter that you type.

Kudos to DevExpress. It looks like they found a good way to bridge the big learning curve that's needed to start using CodeRush effectively. I think this will give the Resharper folks a good competition, and I'm personally going to try it for the next week or so and see how it feels.

Reharper also has a learning curve, and version 2.0 of Resharper tries to fix this (for the Refactoring functionality at least) by introducing a Ctrl-Shift-R shortcut which shows an intellisense list of all refactorings available at the point your caret is on with their shortcuts (yep, it's their own version of a discoverability panel, but it needs its own shortcut, so it's hard to find it..)

It's a step in the right direction, but I think in this case CodeRush will win out in discoverability.