Update: I made a small screencast on ReSharper.

I am a big fan of JetBrains ReSharper. I recommend it to people I work with (if they are not already using a similar tool) and it’s the first tool I talk about in my .Net Ninja’s Toolset presentation. I recently presented the same session at the Baton Rouge Sql Saturday/Tech Day. At the after party, Chris Eargle asked me if I have used JustCode, which is a similar offering from Telerik. I tried using another tool DevExpress CodeRush in the past, and even though I have a lot of friends that use it, it did not suit my workflow. I made a mental note to try out JustCode and for the last 10 days or so, I uninstalled ReSharper and have been using JustCode. I’ll start by summarizing my experience. In my opinion, both R# and JustCode offer you a similar feature set, and I did not find a killer feature that only one of them had. If you are looking for a new tool, download the trial for both of these and try them out for a few weeks to see what suits your workflow better. I have been a ReSharper user for years, and obviously might be biased towards it and my workflow might be set around the features it provides. I really like both JetBrains and Telerik. They are active in supporting the development community and both are sponsors for a user group that I help run. With that out of the way, here are a few things I noticed:

JustCode pros:

• Less CPU and memory intensive that R#.
• Allows you to sync your settings using the cloud.
• Gives you a nice visualization in Visual Studio for keyboard shortcuts. This is quite helpful for a new user.
• Decompiling is faster.

Cons/Things I missed:

• I have to hover my mouse over a warning to see the suggestion. I prefer to keep my hands on the keyboard, and it would be nice to see the warning in the status bar if the caret is on it.
• XAML support seemed a bit wonky. Dynamic resources were often flagged as errors, though this would sometimes gets fixed on recompiling the solution.
• Intellisense does not put parentheses after a method call.
• Input text boxes used for navigation retain the previous input. I rarely need to go back to the same class again, so I can save a few keystrokes if I don’t have to clear the input textbox each time.
• I did not see a way to open recently closed files
• The code analysis was not very good at finding unused variables and members.
• The experience is still a little buggy. Once in a while, simple features such as removing unused directives failed to work.
• This is probably specific to me but the Rename functionality does not play nice with VsVim (a vim emulator extension )
• I have become used to excellent LINQ specific suggestions from R#. I did not see any such code improvement suggestions in JustCode.

Again, these are my observations in a few days of usage where I was mostly working with WPF. Your experience might vary depending on your workflow. The only thing I can recommend for sure is that you should be using at least one of the many Visual Studio productivity plug-ins available.