Ticklish Techs

I am playing around with R#-plugins these days. I have started off with this nice introduction. Unfortunately it silences about some problems that may occur to you in the beginning.

1) When trying to copy the given source code you’ll mention that all the classes are unknown to Visual Studio, because all a lot of references are missing. So far I have no clue about the R#-class-architecture. So I started .NET Reflector, open ALL the .dlls in the R#/bin-folder into Reflector and use the search to find the .dlls to reference in my project.

2) When you have your first R#-plugin ready you want to test it. To do so you have to copy the dll containing your plugin in the R#-plugin folder. You may want to do this in a post-build event like this:


copy $(TargetPath) "C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\ReSharper\v5.1\Bin\PlugIns\WobTest"


When you build your project with this post-build event it fails. This doesn’t work for two reasons. First: Win 7 denies access to that folder. Second: after another start of Visual Studio R# has loaded the plugin so you can’t copy a newer version over it.

My solution to this is a .cmd that starts Visual Studio without R# (devenv /safemode). I run this .cmd as administrator.

Now at least I can debug my plugins by starting another instance of Visual Studio (not in safemode!)

This solution is not cool, because developing R#-plugin without using R# in the development-process sucks…. any ideas?

a better solution…

Some minutes after I published this post, Benjamin pointed me to this page. Forget about my lines to 2). You don’t need a silly .cmd run as administrator not a post-build event. All you need to do is to start your debugging Visual Studio the the command line option /ReSharper.Plugin followed by the path to your plugin-dll.

/ReSharper.Plugin "R:\sandbox\ReSharperPlugInTest\PublicGoesVirtual\PublicGoesVirtual\bin\Debug\PublicGoesVirtual.dll"