Testimonials
IntelliJ IDEA
"Cutting code with IntelliJ IDEA is more fun and easier than even cutting butter with a knife! You are the sword
that makes me a Samurai!"
"IntelliJ IDEA is like religion to me - it is my strength, it is my faith
and it is my guide."
"...IDEA is simply a killer...I paid for the license myself but I felt it was my duty since I want to be as productive as possible."
"If you're one of these people who put free cost above time and money gained a small investment, you should give IDEA a try... It didn't win the Java Developer Journal Reader's Choice award for best Java IDE for nothing."
"...if you've never used IntelliJ, maybe it's worth the effort. Yeah, it costs money, but frankly if you're in the business of making money with your code, it's trivial, especially when you start looking at the features that come "free" with it, and start looking at the extra cost of plugins for some of the competitors.
Why do I like it? Probably familiarity, definitely because it allows me to effortlessly get what's in my head
onto the screen in a seamless manner. I also credit this IDE for making me a better code-writer and giving me
the confidence in my abilities to make the next steps in my career ... and make my code professional.
...
Also if quality, ease of use and completeness of the product are key considerations, you get what
you pay for with IntelliJ and their plugins."
"I want something that just works and the best results I've had is IDEA... as a day to day development
environment IDEA for me is focused on getting things done.
...
When I use IDEA coding tends to be like
morse code, first few chars, ctrl+space. It's smart enough not to throw the whole world at me and knows what i'm
referring to. With touch typing it lets me output code almost as fast as I think and it means I get the feeling
my IDE works with me and doesn't get in the way. "
"Second, JetBrains have released IntelliJ IDEA 7.0. What was simply the best Java IDE on the planet is now also simply the best Groovy/Grails IDE on the planet. Congrats to the JetBrains guys and check it out."
"Most of our engineers do not get any errors at all during compiling because IntelliJ IDEA catches them all during editing. The time we save is remarkable."
"It was really catching on fast, so we purchased a license for everyone who wanted it. That turned out to be pretty much the entire organization."
"When I started writing about refactoring I looked forward to the days when Java programmers could have the same tools that Smalltalkers used to refactor their programs. IntelliJ IDEA gives Java programmers that power, not just through refactorings, but also through innovative code assistance capabilities. These days every Java programmer should use a refactoring tool every day."
"At last, an IDE that understands how I program."
"I have tried numerous Java development environments and found all of them lacking in some way or another. IntelliJ IDEA is different. It's clear to me that it's authors eat their own dog food. It shows through in the design of every feature of the product, many of which are unique to IntelliJ IDEA."
"Finally an IDE that lets you develop as fast as you can think, not as fast as you can type. The way that IntelliJ IDEA lets the IDE take over the routine tasks, doesn't only make development faster and less painful, it can help a lot in making your code contain less errors."
"The key reason for us to develop J2EE with IntelliJ IDEA was it's ability to support the programmer in every conceivable way. Outstanding features like import statement management, syntactic error checking, refactoring and intelligent code completion increased our productivity considerably."
"IntelliJ's IDEA will save you time and money. For developers, IntelliJ IDEA promotes the rapid creation of clean, reusable, and well documented code. For managers and architects, IntelliJ IDEA makes it possible to quickly navigate, review, and refactor code projects large and small. I have been programming full time in Java since early 1996 and I had given up hope that there would be a truly world class IDE for the language. IntelliJ IDEA is world class and I would recommend it to any development team without reservation."
"I've been using IntelliJ IDEA and I am so freaking blown away I can hardly articulate it. This is the best IDE I've ever used. For any language."
TeamCity
"TeamCity is different. And different is better. Build failure spam? No more. Waiting for a success message
before going home? Nope. Lengthy clean and full rebuilds before checking in? Thing of the past. Can't compile
because you synced just after someone else checked in garbage? Never again...
What do you do when you check
in? Sync, clean, build, test, and then submit, right? How long does that take? 15 minutes, 30 minutes? Why don't
we just let the CI server do that for us. ...
TeamCity is simply doing CI the way it should have been done
in the first place.
"So the reason I made the switch is because of the time it take to set it up: 20 minutes. Everything was fully functional in under 20 minutes. I absolutely got no error at all. I just got through all the step of the wizard and then: done. Unit testing, code coverage, build, reports, etc... And it's absolutely free for small team."
"Teamcity is totally awesome, after i got the grails project working the rest was peanuts and i got all the bells and whistels i was looking for."
"In fact my evaluation period ended prematurely because TC gives me all i wanted from our new Java/.NET BuildServer."
"I couldn't believe how easy it was. I installed the server and got my first project up-and-running in about 15
minutes... TeamCity is what TFS and CC.NET should be like when they grow up.
...
After becoming a real
Resharper addict (can't use Visual Studio without it), I'm now becoming a slave to TeamCity as well. I've
converted all my home projects, and life has never been better."
"The coolness of TeamCity just keeps amazing me."
"TeamCity is just packed full of nerdgasm features that just work out of the box. No need to scour the web for plugins, deal with XML, or anything like that. Things just work. For example, you get full status of the build while it is happening--you can see what MSBuild step the build is on, you can see the important messages in the Build Log (it filters them quite intelligently), you can even see what threads/processes are running. If you use their NUnit runner you can even see how many tests have passed/failed/been ignored. All in all, we're very happy with TeamCity. It's just as free as CC.NET for a team of our size, it's much much easier to set up, and it has way more features... JetBrains has a winner here."
"All of the cool options and features aside, the real power comes from the amount of reporting you can get out of this tool automatically with minimal effort... I haven't even begun to dig into all the features in TeamCity... Definitely check it out if you are tired of poking around in xml configuration files for hours on end."
dotTrace
"A great little tool for finding out what parts of your code take the most time/resources. "
ReSharper
I love Resharper! Its tightly integrated unit testing makes it a joy to do test-driven development, its automated refactorings are nothing short of supurb and its code suggestions routinely help me write better C#/VB.NET code.
We are getting licenses! Hurray. Looks like my offer to cut five fingers off of my right hand to demonstrate how unproductive I am without resharper was the ticket.
"As far as I'm concerned Visual Studio without ReSharper is like driving a Mustang with a lawn mower engine. You can do it but who would want to."
"I have been using ReSharper since version 2.x came out, and I must say that it is very hard to develop without this tool. I don't normally depend on a tool to drive my code, but this one is an exception, since it boosts productivity, quality and speed during development."
"If you use Rhino.Mocks, then every class that you mock must implement an interface. With the help of ReSharper, interfaces can be created from an existing class and propagated to the rest of your codebase with just a few keystrokes. This alone makes the price of ReSharper worth it if you are going to start using mocking in a Legacy system that was designed without using interfaces."
"Seriously, how can you develop without it? I guesstimate I lose 2-3 *hours* a day without it just typing redundant code or manually refactoring code. The auto rename of files to match the containing class alone saves massive amounts of time. Not to mention it just makes my code 100% better than if I had coded it by hand."
"R# is a tool that I use and absolutely love. I recommend this for anyone who uses Visual Studio and programs in C# or VB.NET. Those that use R#, we see the benefits that it brings and the absolute productivity boost that you get using it."
"To me my value to a customer is providing the maximum productivity that I can and to me that productivity comes
from using this tool.
...
The way I code works perfectly within the way R# aids me in being
productive. It grants me a fluid motion to refactoring and code efficiency and helps me get into a groove when I
code. A groove that is both productive and efficient and fun."
"I have only really been consistently using ReSharper for the last month and am still far from my goal of
becoming a ReSharper Jedi. Nevertheless, the dozen or so keystrokes that I have mastered and consistently use
are making a noticeable difference in removing some of the coding noise that usually distracts me and slows me
down while coding.
...
The more keyboard shortcuts I have at my disposal, the faster I code and the
better chance I have to get and stay in the zone where I am focused just on solving the problem at hand rather
than getting distracted by syntax and unnecessary keystrokes."
"I'm such a wannabe ReSharper padawan. My motivation is good though: I want to be more productive. On a recent project, I was writing some code in front of a client employee, a novice developer himself, and he exclaimed "The code is just writing itself."
"The ultimate Agile tool is ReSharper. It is the one thing for .NET developers that removes fear of change. Refactoring is just so darn easy that change isn't scary."
"For the last week (at my new gig) I've been using ReSharper 3.0, and I must say I'm pretty darned impressed. I hadn't looked at ReSharper since the very early versions, and had sort of written it off in favor of CodeRush/Refactor, but ReSharper 3 has some pretty compelling features..."
"ReSharper adds to Visual Studio the crucial ability to interactively analyze your code as you edit, giving you deep semantic feedback... ReSharper's interactive analysis... detects things like dead code, possible null references, instance methods that could be made static, unreferenced fields, un-updated writeable fields, etc. ...VS plus ReSharper is certainly a first class IDE."
"Without starting a flame war about which language is better, I just want to let all the VB.NET developers out
there that read this to understand that this tool is THE bomb.
...
I can't imagine coding C#/TDD
without it... If you haven't checked it out, it is worth it. It is the only tool in my arsenal that I was
willing to use my own money. It will pay you back 100 fold."
"What can I say? I love JetBrains ReSharper. If you haven't seen it before, it's an add-in for Visual Studio geared toward refactoring and TDD. Doing TDD without ReSharper installed is like coding Windows Forms in Notepad... ReSharper turns you into an artist sculpting code to be aesthetically beautiful. JetBrains' tagline is "Develop with pleasure!" and ReSharper definitely lives up to that. If you haven't checked it out, I would definitely recommend downloading it and checking it out."
"This is the tool any serious .NET developer must have. I should perhaps qualify it with saying Visual Studio.NET
developer.
It is awesome. The unit test runner is worth the price of the tool alone... The refactoring
support is awesome. The editor enhancements are first rate."