Tools

If you happen to be one of the many people in the unfortunate situation to be stuck working with TFS source control on a daily basis and gaze longingly at the folks using Git or Mercurial wishing you could have some of that distributed goodness for your very own self, I am here to tell you that all is not lost. There are a couple ways you can work with a distributed version control system along side TFS and try and reduce the pain associated with TFS. One way I wrote about here as an answer to a question on StackOverflow. This technique worked fairly well for me dealing with a small codebase with only a few branches. However, it became unmanageable once I started working in an environment which had a large TFS repo with several different branches that I needed to switch between on a regular basis. You can read about some of the issues I ran into within the updated section of the answer, but overall things got messy quickly. ...

I recently decided to take the plunge and get CodeRush and Refactor! Pro (along with DxCore) loaded instead of Resharper. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is a lot I like about Resharper, but overall the performance was becoming an issue. There were often problems with VS freezing for no particular reason, and then coming back as if nothing was wrong…I swear it was like my IDE had narcolepsy or something. One of the things I noticed immediately about CodeRush was the fact that there was a single installer, and when I went to run it I was able to install it on all versions of Visual Studio, including the Orcas Beta. This was nice when compared to Resharper’s separate install for vs 2005 and vs 2003. It also makes me feel good about improvements in the product being available for all versions of the IDE. One thing that I noticed about R# was that there was some work being done in the VS 2005 version around performance, but that did not seem to trickle down to the VS 2003 version. I think the big reason for this is the fact that CodeRush and Refactor! are implemented on top of DxCore, which provides a very clean abstraction from the scariness that is the Visual Studio integration layer. ...