CodeRush Xpress and backslashes on a non-US keyboard
If you haven’t tried boosting your Visual Studio productivity with CodeRush Xpress, you might want a take look. But if you use a non-US keyboard layout, you’ll hit some problems.
As announced last fall, Developer Express has made a free Visual Studio 2008 Addin available. CodeRush Xpress contains refactoring and code search, visualization and testing helpers for common C# development scenarios. It’s not quite on par with ReSharper, but it’s free and adds quite a few features you might want. If you’re not yet familiar with it, check it out!
A small caveat: When you install it, you may find your backslash – or perhaps curly braces – have stopped working. For me (using a Finnish keyboard layout) the problem was that Ctrl-Alt-+ was mapped to “Expand selection”, which expands the selected segment of text. When I then typed “C:\”, I ended up with “C:” as selected text – Ctrl-Alt-+ happens to coincide with the \ on a Finnish keyboard!
The fix is of course to alter the keyboard shortcuts, but that’s nontrivial as the Xpress version doesn’t seem to expose its settings too well. Some users say they have a DevXpress menu, but if you don’t, hitting Ctrl-Shift-Alt-O opens the CodeRush Xpress setup window and allows you to alter or disable the conflicting shortcuts.
July 7, 2009
Tags: addins, development tools, Visual Studio Posted in: .NET
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