Resharper Open Source License = Awesome (and free!)

A while ago I heard about an add-on for Visual Studio called Jetbrains Resharper – most people reading this article have probably heard of it, too. Anyway, I downloaded the evaluation version from the Resharper website and tried it out. If you are prepared to deal with a very slight slow-down in your Visual Studio environment (inevitable with add-ons) it’s an add-on well worth investigating. From the Resharper website:

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. A number of professional software engineer colleagues of mine, all of whom have worked on massive enterprise solutions, use Resharper themselves; Resharper isn’t just for people who can’t figure out errors themselves.

Ok so this sounds like a sales pitch but the main point of this article is that you can get Resharper for free if you’re developing open-source software. I’ve developed a number of open-source libraries that I use in my own applications and I’ve decided to make them available on this website in case any other developers out there find them useful. Because of the way I make them available I don’t tick all the boxes for the Resharper open-source license requirements. I discussed this with the Resharper licensing people and they were happy to grant me an open-source license for the full version of Resharper anyway. That’s pretty cool and means I’m happy to ‘sell’ their product for them.

If you’re interested in this too, please visit the open-source licensing page for Resharper. Cool.

Check out StyleCop for Resharper too!