JetBrains Sharpens C# Tool

JetBrains has released the beta version of its C# tool and is expected to announce the commercial version in a week or two, the company said.

JetBrains, of Prague, Czech Republic, said ReSharper 2.0 is scheduled for release in mid-May.

ReSharper is an add-in to Microsofts Visual Studio that increases the productivity of C# developers, JetBrains officials said.

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ReSharper 2.0 provides developers with access to features from integrated development environments, including Visual Studio .Net 2005, Visual Studio .Net 2003, Visual Basic .Net and ASP .Net, the company said.

New in the 2.0 release are improved coding assistance and error checking.

The new version adds a lot of minor usability features to areas of coding assistance such as code completion, navigation, code generation, on-the-fly errors and warnings highlighting, JetBrains officials said.

ReSharper 2.0 also adds 10 new refactorings, including Safe Delete, Pull Members Up and Push Members Down, the company said.

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Other new features include ASP .Net editing, NAnt and MSBuild scripts editing, unit tests support and an open API, the company said.

Valentin Kipiatkov, JetBrains chief scientist and vice president of product development, said ReSharper 2.0 "includes powerful new C# 2.0 language constructs such as generics, iterations, partial types and anonymous methods..."

Kipiatkov said ReSharper 2.0 not only helps developers write and navigate their code, but also to maintain and test their applications, as well as edit their build scripts.

Damon Wilder Carr, chief technologist and chief executive at Agilefactor, in New York, said ReSharper "has dramatically made my life better—seriously."

Kipiatkov said ReSharper 2.0, as with IntelliJ IDEA, JetBrains tool for Java developers, dramatically cuts the amount of routine "hand-work" developers have to do when coding.

When it becomes available later in May, ReSharper 2.0 is expected to sell for $199 per license. It also will be available in a free 30-day trial version, the company said.

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