I’m a fan of Resharper, I think it’s one of the best (if not THE best) Visual Studio add-in you can find around; but it always have had stability problems (mitigated by a wrapper used to launch Visual Studio, see my previous post: Resharper and the OutOfMemoryException) and it tended to slow down the whole IDE when you were working on medium to large projects (let’s say 30+ projects in a solution) and especially if you have to deal with old style web projects (it was a little better with web application projects).
Thus I got the habit of keeping it disabled and enable it only when I have to do some refactoring to the project I’m working on, anyway this was you loose a lot of the great features Resharper offer to you.
Usually I do not install beta version of tools in my main production environment; but after having heard some enthusiastic feedback from a couple of friends (Alkampfer's Place and moleskine di un programmatore), I decided to give it a try.
I can say this new version is a big improvement in speed and responsiveness of the whole environment, you do not have to wait anymore that Resharper caches all the assemblies in the project so you can start working immediately after opening the solution while it continues to load and parse assemblies in background. It’s generally faster in opening new code files and analyze them, that can be seen especially when working with aspx pages or xaml files.
It also seems to use less memory and be more stable than the previous version: opening a very big solution with mixed language (C#, VB.net) and very different kinds of projects (library, Silverlight, WPF...) didn’t resulted in the usual OutOfMemoryException without using the wrapper.
