Question

I used to be a Java user, but I moved into 100% .NET 4 years ago. Having grown accustomed to ReSharper and all the commands it offers, how does it compare to IntelliJ? Both being from JetBrains, I’d imagine they are close – but I haven’t used it. (I know I can do that and answer myself, but YMMV.)

Thanks;

Answer 1

I used to work side-by side with idea and vs+resharper. I found them to be close enough that I at some point considered the syntax coloring to be the biggest difference. I’m not sure if that really is correct, but it certainly felt like that at the time.

At the time I was writing a web frontend in C# and a backend in java, and I am fairly certain I was using the proper tool for each job. Remember that IntelliJ Idea is a fairly code-centric IDE and Visual Studio is a very visual IDE. It’s just not entirely fair on either of them to compare them directly.

Visual Studio (and also Netbeans for java) tries to assist you with as much as possible through wizards and designers that sometimes hide the code from your view (Visual Studio does an excellent job with the designers, and they even added partial classes to the language to make it even better). Idea tries to give you maximum punch but working with the code instead of creating too many ‘visual abstractions’. Instead it does a really great job of assisting you at the cursor and really feels much more like an extension of my hand/brain motion than Visual Studio does. I think it must be the way concert pianists feel. Am I going over the top here ?

When it comes to the stuff that resharper introduces to Visual Studio, I think the code analysis and refactoring options are fairly identical. I also think a resharper user will feel very much at home in idea. As an Idea user I feel naked in visual studio without resharper 🙂