Question

I just installed CodeRush to my VS and when I run VS for the first time after installation it showed me a dialog asking if I’m experienced user. While the dialog was visible I could see that there was new menu item in VS named DevExpress. There was a small check box on that dialog saying something about menu items that I probably should have checked. As I did not the menu items disappeared just after I clicked OK.

I cannot make that menu item reappear. Can somebody help me with this ?

Answer 1

DevExpress Menu Disappearing

Typically the menu disappearing is not an evaluation issue. Instead this is the normal behaviour of CodeRush Xpress.

This menu can indeed be brought back. This needs to be done for each Major version (2 – 3 of these each year). Here are the instructions for doing so with 10.1

However it may be enough to know that the options are available through the use of the CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+O shortcut

CodeRush Xpress

The Xpress of CodeRush is not an evaluation version although it is a cut down version.
(Trial of full version of CodeRush available here)
It is Free to use with VS2005, VS2008 and VS2010 because Microsoft paid DevExpress to licence it to every user of (the Pro versions and higher of) these products.

Along with this, Microsoft also wrote several conditions into this agreement.

The first of these appears to have been the removal of the DevExpress menu from the main menu bar.

Additionally in version 10.1 and higher (required if you want to use CodeRush Xpress with VS2010) several other functions were also removed at the request of MS (but only whilst running under VS2010 – these functions remain whilst using 10.1 with earlier versions of Studio)

This is indeed a shame but as MS paid for this product they are entitled to have a say in what goes into it.