It does so much more than that too. It is, hands down, the best code beautifier/formatter in existence. After getting used to developing with it, I'm hooked. Whenever I switch to a machine without it, I'm like WTF is going on here? Oh yeah, R# isn't installed on this machine.

Yeah, the subscription model sucks. I just checked their page and it's $300 for the first year. I guess it depends if you're just coding for kicks or if this is your business. If it's the latter, I'd recommend sucking it up and buying it for at least one year. If you're just learning/tinkering with C# then it's hard to justify that much money.

Great post, you've echoed a lot of thoughts I've had in recent years. What is the obsession with FOSS? I'll admit I made a FOSS program that mostly just competed with other FOSS programs, so it was a fun thing to do. However, it was still years of work that I didn't get paid for. Like you mentioned, in the long run it's not sustainable. These two thoughts are incompatible:

1) I want to make 100k+ per year.

2) I want to give away my labor for free.

I never followed or looked up to Stallman the way some do. I just thought he was a looney academic blowhard like the rest of them. Once I saw a picture of what he looked like, my suspicions were confirmed (yes, I'll judge someone on appearance).

As part of his schtick, he can always drag the little guys in front of the cameras: "See, FOSS is good, cause little Jimmy here can use a free compiler and editor to learn to write hello world in his African village. Aww, isn't that sweet!". But in the end, the real beneficiaries are the smart and profitable companies who can get a ton of stuff without having to pay for it and really leverage it.

But the conspiracy theorist in me thinks he's a corporate plant. Think about it, he has convinced thousands of people to put in millions of hours of work and give it away for free. Much of that work product is in heavy use in corporate environments. Hell, we use a ton of it at my work and it's great. We didn't pay a dime and sure as hell don't donate to the dupes who wrote the stuff. But we sure do make a lot of money using it! Guess who we do pay tens of thousands of dollars per year to? People who charge for their software.

I completely agree that it's fine if you want to tinker, or compete with other FOSS projects. But for the general consensus to be that things should just all be free is totally self destructive. There is not a single other industry in existence that thinks with this suicidal nature.

I'll conclude by saying that I am a good software citizen and do donate to most FOSS products that I use.

Buy Resharper by Jet Brains, you'll thank me later. It actually gives a warning that you did not await the call to GetSomethingAsync(). As far as comparison to null, I'm not sure if it'll warn for that. It'll give you all sorts of other warnings and hints showing all the flaws in your code that you never knew you had. Nobody should be developing C# without it.

Great writeup Bryan, love the Orwell comparison in there! Don't ever back down from the PC language and thought police.

On a related note, I am a senior dev and am lucky enough to be at a company where this crap doesn't really happen. Sure there's technical debt, but every time I tell my boss I'm fixing it, he doesn't seem to mind and understands it's a worthwhile investment. One possible difference is that everything I write is only used internally and is never seen by the outside world.

This is something that has always perplexed me. I remember when MS first included compression on the right click menu and thought to myself "this is great, no more having to install a separate program". Then I used it and was let down by how slow it was and never used it again.

Why, with their limitless resources, could they not invest a little bit into making it just as good as the freely available stuff out there? A company which was a fraction of the size could have done it, but why not MS? I don't know what their current compression offerings are because I haven't checked in years, but man, they really sucked when they first came out. I use 7-zip now.

I'm not exactly sure about shifting signed integers, since you'd have to deal with the two's complement stuff. But for unsigned ints, the only time I've ever shifted was parsing/encoding data formats which either toggled individual bits, or used bits which did not break on byte boundaries for specific values.

Great writeup. Environment/project/solution setup is so often overlooked, yet it's so critical. I passed this hump about 18 years ago, but great for newcomers to see. Hopefully this saves a few of them from pulling out their hair.

Finance industry. It's going well, not too hard and good money.

Just look at the sheer volume of distraction that caused. Hundreds upon hundreds of comments. All of that time could have been spent on actually doing work. There is simply no limit to the amount these people will take. That is all they know how to do, give them an inch and they will take, and take, and take until there is nothing left.

Do not ever give in to a single thing these people "demand".

That was awesome, I LOLed for real. Thanks!

Please provide a Venn diagram.

Trance-ish type stuff on Spotify, usually found on the ASOT show.

I sometimes listen to music with lyrics, but I find they can distract me. Instrumental only seems to provide enough distraction from the outside world and random thoughts passing through my head, while not distracting me from the task at hand. I often say that the most productivity-enhancing technology ever created is a pair of headphones.