Baby Steps: CodeRush Plugin Development

    I mentioned in my previous post that I’ve grown quite some interest in CodeRush from DevExpress, and part of that is because of the plug-in model they have in place, which is pretty powerful, yet simple to tap into and develop refactorings, code-providers, etc.

    In this post, I’m going to talk about the first CodeRush plugin I’ve ever wrote! It has a funny story, actually, where I was watching this recording of a CodeRush Feature Workshop, and at some point in the webinar, an attendee asked a question about how would a particular refactoring be implemented. Rory, started talking about that, and how easy it would be, then Mark Miller said: “Well, I almost wanna right that right now! It's like, so easy to do”. I thought to myself: “why not?!, this is my chance! :D”, and I just stopped the recording right away, opened Visual Studio and started developing my first Plugin! :) Just to be honest, as Mark suggested, this is very basic, and simple. But, heck, it got me hooked! 

DevExpress CodeRush

So, recently, I’ve been having more and more interest in DevExpress’s CodeRush add-in for Visual Studio. I’ve had CodeRush Xpress installed for some time, but couldn’t use it well because of a certain performance issue. After fixing that issue, by disabling a couple of features that were slowing it down: I’ve been in contact via twitter with Rory Becker from DevExpress, and he gave me a lot of help with CodeRush, like using its powerful templates and so on. Since then, I found CodeRush to be very powerful productivity tool, and actually kind of fun also, and it helped me save a lot of time.

OK, enough with the not-very-important talk. Why am I talking about this anyway? Well, that’s because I’m going to try and post about the cool stuff I find out and learn about CodeRush. Also, since I’m following some DevExpress Webinars, especially some of the ones about writing CodeRush Plug-Ins, I’m going to try and post about that, and comment on some examples showing the development step-by-step. CodeRush plug-in development doesn’t seem to be very hard, yet it’s very enjoyable.

Important links:

• DevExpress
  
• CodeRush, CodeRush Xpress
  
• DevExpress Webinars
  
• CodeRush Community Plug-Ins

Make sure you follow @RoryBecker the DevExpress Community guy, @MillerMark the DevExpress Guru, and of course @AbdouMoumen the CodeRush novice (aka: me :) )