A few weeks back, JetBrains released version 4.5 of ReSharper, probably the most popular and most widely-used plug-in for Visual Studio. All of the features included in the product, can be found here.
I have to admit, while I liked the plug-in earlier already, I've been always a bit afraid of the performance implications it brings along. Since it does background compiling, it is putting more load on your machine, mostly in memory usage. This also resulted in longer loading times for projects. I remember when loading a DotNetNuke website, it took quite long to load the project.
The main goal of the 4.5 release was performance and memory usage. In the newsletter that announced the release, you could read the following:
" As announced, the new version features major improvements in performance and memory usage. After all, what is a productivity tool for if not for being agile, robust and responsive?"
I was eagerly awaiting this version, mainly because of this improvements, so I installed it immediately. I'm currently doing a project where I work on a VPC (Virtual PC image), so that would be a good test.
Since then, I'm really blown away by it. It has great performance now, you only notice a small delay when loading or creating a project. Once running, there's no noticeable difference anymore between running with or without ReSharper. The memory usage of the devenv.exe process is still higher than without Resharper, but again, it went down since previous releases.
My development machine is also the one I use most of the time to do presentations and demo's. I do disable Resharper when giving presentations, since it may confuse attendees when seeing other IntelliSense. Also, like I said, creating an application is a tad slower still, so for demo purposes, that's not a good thing.
Some people argued that running Visual Studio without Resharper was not what a professional developer should do. My only argument against that, up until now, was the performance hit you suffered. Since that is now also gone, I don't see a reason why you should not have it in your toolbox.
More info on the product can be found at www.jetbrains.com.
PS: I'm not sponsored by JetBrains to write this review, it's my personal opinion.