After reading some of the reviews on CodeRush, and finally getting around to seeing Scott Hanselman's Developer Productivity Tools 4 video, I decided to finally give CodeRush a try.

On the surface and in the videos, it looks really cool.  It has a great collection of templates and its visual indicators are great.  I love how it visualizes breaks/returns, how it helps visualize different code blocks, and everything about it is excellent.  I could totally see myself leveraging and enjoying all that it has to offer.

The problem though, is that it lacks a number of features from ReSharper that I have come to depend on.  Right after I opened a project and was trying CodeRush, I was messing around with code and changed the name of a variable on a line.  I paused for a second, expecting the name to turn red because it didn't exist, but it didn't.  I added some code and realized I was missing a using, and it didn't prompt me.  I then manually used 'us<space>' and 'usx<space>' to add some using clauses, and it didn't tell me when I had some references I didn't need.  Right away, I missing something.  While CodeRush is a strong templating engine, it lacks what I love so much about ReSharper... its live evaluation of the code and syntax highlighting.  I love being aware of errors before I go to compile.  I love its side bar indicating where all of the errors and warnings are in the current document.  I love its navigation features, being able to quickly find all references to a method/property/variable.  Some of them are features that are in Visual Studio without ReSharper, but ReSharper simply makes them better.

I suppose I thought I'd enjoy CodeRush because it looked new and exciting, and since I've been using ReSharper for 2 years already, I had become so used to it that the line of what features were ReSharper and which were Visual Studio had been blurred.  I'd right click to look for "Find Usages Advanced" and say to myself, "Ohh yeah, that was a part of ReSharper".

If I had found CodeRush before ReSharper, I would have loved it and probably come to depend on it as much as I have with ReSharper.  However, I've instead become dependent upon ReSharper.  If in a future version, they add some of the things like live code analysis, then I will definitely give it another try, though for now, my first love is still ReSharper.