I have been rather disappointed with most of the EAP builds of the Resharper 2.0 to the point that I’ve been considering moving to another add-in with similar functionality.

The worst was slowness of Visual Studio 2005 with R# installed and really, really weird coloring (which is a bug in Visual Studio 2005, but nevertheless). I am one of those that can’t work productively without fully colored source code (using my own color scheme).

Build after build, I’ve been installing EAP Resharper 2.0 (into a virtual machine) and immediately uninstalling it.

Not any more. Just this morning I received a notification about a beta release and decided to try it on my production machine. The coloring bug has been fixed via hotfix from Microsoft and besides from a few irritating R# crashes that went away after I restarted Visual Studio 2005, it works as good as 1.5 did when I used it with Visual Studio 2003!

This is great news. What I like about Resharper the most is all those small assistants that pop up constantly reminding you about unused members, redundant usings, redundant initializations etc. Fixing all these means more readable code and as we all know code is read many times and only written once.

There is only one really strange thing – once R# crashes, you get a dialog detailing what happened and an opportunity to send the call stack to the authors. However, you must be a member of their developer network (or whatever they call it) in order to do so?!? Come on guys, I am helping you with the bug report, don’t make me register in order to help you. Take a look at how Microsoft is doing this – all crash submissions are completely anonymous - does it really matter to you who I am?