Now that Developer Express have made a version of Refactor! available for free for VB.NET 2005 (see my previous post), why should one consider to spend money for the professional edition of the product? Detailed information on this topic is still in the works, but here’s the bottom line (quoting Richard Morris, the CTO of Developer Express):

The features of Refactor! Pro (R!pro) that are not in Refactor! (R!) include

  • more languages (Visual Basic AND C#)
  • more Visual Studio IDEs (VS2002, 2003, and 2005)
  • the ability to tweak and configure refactor through the Options dialog
  • extra Refactorings: 4 extra right now, but we plan more

Also R!Pro includes our Visual extensibility API — so you will be able to build custom refactorings using any .NET language. I am fully expecting to see VB developers building tools for their C# peers. NB: A few of the extra refactorings (like “rename” and “safe rename”) will be available free of charge in the Bonus Refactorings pack available to developers who register R! but we plan a whole bunch of extra refactorings between now and the release of VS 2005 and some will be for the Pro product only .

Personally I’ve been using Refactor! Professional for quite a while during the beta program and I’d really recommend having a look at it. The C# support, for one thing, is very good and competes easily with the builtin functionality of VS 2005. I hope more information will be available soon, for now this page tells about the Refactor! Professional edition.