Something, Beta, this way comes.

The 1st beta of CodeRush 3.0, Refactor 3.0 and therefore of course DXCore 3.0 is now available to subscribers of DevExpress' IDE Tools.

NOTE: These will replace version 2.x if installed and support has now been dropped entirely for VS2003 as all libraries are not build using .Net 2.0

Refactor! Vs Code!

Refactor has had a makeover and split it's offerings into "Refactor" items and "Code" items. At the moment, the pre-existing Refactor items are available in the Refactor! section. These are the items that take your code and reshape it, improving the readability and reusability without altering the effect it produces.

Next up is the all new Code! section. The Code! section is for items which, unlike their Refactor siblings, do alter the code they act upon. Items like "Rotate item 90 degrees" act on some selected code and modify it in some way.  To quote Mark Miller:

'Rotate 90 Degrees' is most useful, taking logic that applies in one direction, and rotating it to apply in the other direction (converting Width to Height, X to Y, Left to Top, Right to Bottom, Column to Row, etc.), while 'Mirror Code' is less useful (converting Left to Right, "+" to "-", Top to Bottom, etc).

Other items available in Code! include the "Declare" range. These allow you to generate Classes, Structs, Interfaces, Constructors, Locals, Fields, Properties, Setters and Getters from references.

Code Issues

Refactor has always suffered from a small problem which was that you had to know that a Refactoring could be used before you could use it. So you would place your caret somewhere in code and if Refactorings were possible, then you would see the Refactoring SmartTag which lead to the SmartMenu which would then show you the refactorings that could be applied in the current location.

But if you never placed your caret in the correct location then you would have to rely on past knowledge to tell you where you might be able to refactor.

Code Issues is a promising little piece of architecture which will allow CodeRush to highlight code smells and bring to your attention, those items which could do with a little refactoring.

In the beta there are 2 Code Issues that are  highlighted. 'Undeclared Elements' and 'Unused Declarations'. This means that if you declare a variable or method but do not use it, the declaration with be highlighted and your attention drawn to it.

When I first started to use the new version of CodeRush, I thought I was suffering some strange programming glitch. I appeared to have some kind of graphical corruption on the right hand side of my editor. It turns out that this is in fact a graphical map (see right) of the code Issues in the current document (Left).

The purpose of these would seem to be to help further draw your attention to your code issues. I have seen no sign of a Code Issues ToolWindow so far, but then this is the first beta and there are some issue preventing me at this time from accessing some of the more traditional ToolWindow. (CodeRush, Messages, Expression Lab).

As I have said there are only 2 Code Issues Providers so far but another quote from Mark Miller reveals a little about what is to come:

With regard to error checking, the goal is to ultimately implement all of the errors, warning, and hints produced by each of the language compilers we support. With regard to code smells, that's a much broader area, and for the most part we won't be talking about what we'll be addressing there until its released, other than to say that if we have a refactoring or code provider designed to solve a problem, it is highly likely that you'll see us ship a corresponding code issue provider to highlight opportunities to improve the code.

So stay tuned and I'll see what else I can find out for you.