Today it was announced that Resharper 5.0 will soon be introduced as part of the public EAP (Early Access Program).  As one on JetBrains .NET Academy Experts I’ve had access to Resharper 5.0 for a few weeks. While in the coming weeks and months you’ll hear quite a bit from developers who are trying out Resharper 5.0 I wanted to alert you to one of my favorite features at this point.

Bookmarks

I read a lot more code than I write. When exploring new projects, doing code reviews, tracking down a bug, I like to mark different paths the flow of execution may take.  Most often to keep track of call stacks and what goes where, I usually end up using a piece of paper with a pencil drawing lines to various methods and interfaces. I could use Visual Studio which has had the concept of bookmarks for some time.  You can put a bookmark in code which creates a bit of a mark in your file that you can come back to later.

The problem with these bookmarks is that they’re flat and don’t and you get options of previous or next, but never the opportunity to define what “next” means? Hopping from bookmark to bookmark may not actually follow any intended path you meant to take when you placed the bookmark.

Resharper 5.0 introduces the concept of bookmarks where you can set order.

Now I can happily bounce around code and easily inspect different control flows in a much more controlled fashion.

ReSharper has been part of my toolset now for several years and I think what they’re doing is great.  While ReSharper 5.0 is a bit buggy at times I like it and the improvements it brings. I am looking forward to further EAP releases of ReSharper and encourage you to check them out as well. Should be coming by the end of this month.