The problem I had with CodeRush turns out to have been caused by an overlooked Continue While statement. Sorry about that, DevExpress.

I’ll hand it to them, they are a good bunch for paying attention to their users. I’d only really interacted with them while using their rich-client grids, which are extraordinarily capable but kind of painful if you don’t have a recent license and a senior dev who knows them inside and out (of course, so is any third-party control).

Trying out CodeRush, which is Microsoft’s recommended refactoring-in-VB.NET solution, was a very different affair. I think the UI is clumsy – particularly clicking a context menu button to get a special context menu for refactoring – but I can see why they’ve made the choices they have. Limiting the refactoring menu to valid operations for the current block makes sense.

Having said that, I’ve used at least a couple of tools that offer suggestions for block completion in other languages, so it’s still pretty ugly by comparison. Not their fault, I’m sure, but still frustrating when trying to write code in a shop that uses VB.NET exclusively.