I’ve been working on a sizable ASP.NET project and the Visual Studio .NET native Refactoring inside of this project is driving me crazy with its slow as molasses performance. So much so that I’ve pretty much dismissed using it until a change is truly project wide. For little changes like renaming or even extracting methods I sit and wait for 20-30 seconds just for VS to come back. And this is even for local renames, which is crazy for VS to go out and scan the whole project.

Since I’ve been on Vista I hadn’t reinstalled CodeRush and Refactor! both of which I like loads, but have been living without for a while, not wanting to tempt fate on Vista <g>. A couple of days ago I decided I have to reinstall the tools, especially for Refactor! but found out that the latest versions don’t install correctly on Vista.

A couple of posts on the CodeRush Forum later I got an answer from Matt Peters who was kind enough to point me in the right direction (I’m sure somebody from the CodeRush team probably had answered a long time ago but I didn’t see any entries in the reader).

Anyway, I thought I’d repost the steps here in case you’re in the same boat( Note: DevExpress is working on getting the install to work on Vista, so this may get fixed real soon. I’m running 2.01 of both CR and RF).

Step 1:

Install both tools and first check whether they’re working. On Vista they probably won’t with or without UAC enabled. I run with User Account Protection off but the install still didn’t work. If it doesn’t shut down VS.

Step 2:

Add the CodeRush Plugins folder to VS: Tools | Options | Environment | Add-inMacros Security

Add the Plugins folder from here:

c:\program files\ developer express inc\dxcore for visual studio .net\2.0\bin\plugins

Step 3:

Move the .addin file to the User addins folder.

From: c:\Application Data\Microsoft\MSEnvShared\Addins

To:  Documents\Visual Studio 2005\addins

Restart and things should start working now.

Interestingly both tools installed fine without any adjustments for VS 2003.

I suspect the problem is that VS doesn’t have the appropriate rights to write files out in some folder on Vista that’s causing this damn mess. I’ve noticed that a few programs that write files out to temp folders or into the document folder seem to have problems. Most notable is WinZip which fails to open files directly unless you copy them to disk first. Probably fixable with an explicit download path, but…

Apparently this is a greater problem for add-ins in general according to some Microsoft folks. Yuk. You figure somebody would have thought of that beforehand! After all, all of this is built BY DEVELOPERS for crying out loud. <s>

Hope this helps somebody out. Knowing customer service at DevExpress, those guys are probably on it and have this fixed shortly…