I enjoyed the point about the Porche, while fun it doesn’t make me more productive.

Perhaps I will change my opinion on this as I use the Xpress version for a longer period of time. After my trial of Resharper I was completely willing to spend the company’s money on it, so there is some level of hypocrisy here on my part;-) Well, that was before I couldn’t get it to install, but I think I make my point.

There is a subtle difference here though. The porche won’t help you make back any of the money you spend on it. In fact, it will loose most of it’s value as you drive it out of the dealership.

However something like coderush, used properly can actively speed up your coding experience or allow you to do things you simply couldn’t do before.

My contention is that it actively saves/ makes you money.

Ask yourself, how much time does it take you to earn $249 (the price of Coderush) the ask your self if you think purchasing the tool, would save you that much time during it’s use.

However…. none of this changes your point … if you can’t afford it or the money simply isn’t available right now, then those are the facts and that really is an end to it.

I do sympathize. We’re all having to be careful about our spending and I wouldn’t want to encourage you to go beyond what you feel is appropriate budget wise.

Any ways should things change and you find yourself wanting to learn more… feel free to contact me…

I hope things go well for you either way

Second, it was an absolute nightmare uninstalling Resharper. I really cannot say enough bad things on this point. I had to completely reinstall Visual Studio and get all my settings working again. I had a very unpleasant experience with their customer support regarding that issue. Well after I had gotten my system fixed finally someone from JetBrains emailed to try to help.

CodeRush Xpress so far seems nice. I don’t think it is any better than Resharper. But $249 is too much. There are other places I can spend that money. Again, if it were $49 I would get the trial and purchase if I like it. But why try something if you know you won’t purchase it? I am not going to go try a new Porche out because I think I might like it; its too expensive. This is a personal point for me. I know that people claim productivity improvements; I believe them. But where do you draw the line with price? Perhaps someone else find $249 reasonable. What if it were $2499? I know its all relative. For me it costs way too much.

I am not a marketing person. I don’t know if a $49 price point would sell more than 5 times as many copies of CodeRush Pro. I do think that I would buy it if it is as good as advertised for that price. More importantly, I think my boss would have no problem approving it at that price.

Also I would argue that the productivity benefits you’ll gain through the use of something like CodeRush would save you the cost of purchase many times over. I have been using the tool for over 3 years now and don’t regret my purchase for a minute.

Also AFAIK DevExpress offer a 30 day trial and a 60 day money back guarentee on CodeRush and all their other products. So in reality you could try the product for 90 days and still decide against it if you wanted.

FWIW feel free to ask me any CodeRush related questions via twitter (@rorybecker) or email (rorybecker@gmail.com)