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Both Developer Express' CodeRush and Whole Tomato's Visual Assist X are excellent tools. I've found that CodeRush has a prettier UI, and it's "marker" mechanic is extremely useful, and it has a larger palette of refactorings available. On the other hand, CodeRush occasionally makes mistakes with it's refactorings, particularly when working with C++ projects. Therefore I usually disable CR there. VAX doesn't have near the number of refactorings as CR does, but they all consistently work. VAX is also much better at unobtrusively making Visual Studio better -- doing things like improving features that already exist, instead of CR's method of almost building an IDE inside of an IDE.

Long story short, I like both tools, and would like to use both tools. The problem is that they do a few things that conflict. I would like to set things up such that whenever there is a conflict between a CodeRush command and a Visual Assist command, the VAX command "wins". Is there an easy way to do this?

Billy ONeal
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  • Related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3714681/running-visual-assist-x-and-resharper-5-0-at-the-same-time – sbi Nov 05 '10 at 21:54
  • I'm not aware of an easy way to do this, but if you list commands I could tell you how to disable them in CodeRush, so they don't conflict with VAX. – Alex Skorkin Nov 08 '10 at 11:37
  • Sorry for being late, here is the result of testing VAX & IDE Tools co-existence. Hope, you'll find it useful - http://tiny.cc/xuw14. – Alex Skorkin Dec 09 '10 at 22:24

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What ReSharper does is that when it has an option that conflicts with the default Visual Studio settings, it installs a marshal that when you choose the option, asks you which one you want to win. That gives us an option.

The option would be to find out what options conflict between these two tools and do one of the following:

  1. Implement a marshal that asks you which option to choose or, the one you probably prefer

  2. Force the action of this option to the tool you prefer.

It may be possible to device a macro that performs this job. To implement such a script, it's important to know what type of options are conflicting. Are you talking about shortcuts, menu options, toolbar options? With this information and your Visual Studio installation, it should be possible to automatically update all the options and pick the one you want.

Pieter van Ginkel
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  • That's nice for ReSharper, but I'm not dealing with ReSharper here, am I? The bigger problem is that CodeRush has **thousands** of settings to choose from. That's why I'm looking for a preset or easy way to prevent the conflict in the first place. +1. – Billy ONeal Nov 12 '10 at 02:03
  • ReSharper is an example of how this could be achieved, that's all. A way to accomplish this would then be to first install Visual Assist and create a macro that detects what options were changed. Then you install CodeRush and see what it changes and you use that information to correct your settings. The thing though is that I guess this does not just concern overwriting of shortcuts, but rather extra menu items and additions to how the editor works, yes? That would mean that there aren't really any conflicts but rather two options that do roughly the same of which you only want one.[continued] – Pieter van Ginkel Nov 12 '10 at 06:04
  • The problem with that is that it really isn't possible to have something automated to solve this because you have no automated way of finding out what does and what doesn't conflict; at least not as far as I can see. If this actually is your problem, I'm afraid this will become very difficult to accomplish. – Pieter van Ginkel Nov 12 '10 at 06:05
  • @Pieter: I know there's no automated way to do it; but if someone had already gone through the settings of both programs and either A. wrote a tutorial on how to accomplish this, or B. write a program that modified the settings of one program to not conflict with the other, that would still be an "automated" solution from my perspective. – Billy ONeal Nov 14 '10 at 02:06
  • I'm awarding you the bounty because it expires and I don't want half the rep to go down the drain. For the record however this isn't really the answer I'm looking for. ;) – Billy ONeal Nov 14 '10 at 02:07
  • I understand. I hoped somebody else would have jumped in by now. Thank you very much anyway. – Pieter van Ginkel Nov 14 '10 at 06:03