JetBrains Rider - Detailed Review

JetBrains Rider Overview

JetBrains Rider is a comprehensive and feature-rich Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that offers a wide range of tools and functionalities, particularly enhanced by its integration with AI and other advanced features. Here are the main features and how they work:

Performance Analysis

JetBrains Rider is particularly useful for Unity development, where it highlights performance-sensitive areas such as `Update`, `FixedUpdate`, and `LateUpdate` methods, as well as coroutine methods. It identifies expensive operations like `GetComponent`, `Find`, or `SendMessage` and suggests moving the initialization to `Start` or `Awake` to improve performance. This analysis can be enabled and configured via the settings (`Ctrl Alt S`), and performance indicators can be displayed in the editor gutter or as Code Vision metrics.

Unity Explorer and Package Management

Rider provides a Unity Explorer tool window that shows all the assets in your Unity project. The Packages node displays the contents of the Packages folder, allowing you to edit the `manifest.json` file and manage packages referenced in your project. This integration ensures that any changes made in Rider are reflected in your Unity project.

Inspections and Quick-Fixes

Rider includes over 2500 on-the-fly code inspections to detect compiler and runtime errors, suggest corrections, and improve code quality. It warns against issues such as unknown scenes, tags, and layers, and highlights incorrect event function signatures with quick-fixes to correct them. For example, it suggests rewriting inefficient string literal comparisons with the `tag` property to use `CompareTag` instead. It also identifies and suggests removing dead code, such as empty event functions.

Unity Logs and Debugging

When connected to the Unity editor, Rider provides a Unity tool window that brings Unity’s Console into the IDE. This allows you to view and interact with Unity log entries, filter them by event type, and navigate to source files mentioned in the logs. This feature enhances debugging by making log entries interactive and easily accessible.

AI Integration

JetBrains Rider includes an AI Assistant that can explain and refactor your code using pre-written prompts. You can select a code fragment, right-click, and choose “AI Actions” to explain the code or refactor it. The AI Assistant provides explanations and suggestions based on the project-specific context, including the languages and technologies used. You can also define custom prompts and add them to the AI Actions menu.

Code Generation and Templates

Rider offers a variety of code generation actions to produce boilerplate code, such as type constructors, properties, and override members. Live templates help you create smart, quickly deployable snippets for frequently used code structures. This feature saves time by automating the creation of routine code elements.

Navigation and Search

The IDE provides powerful navigation and search capabilities, allowing you to jump to any file, type, or member in your codebase. You can find usages of any symbol, including cross-language and string literal usages, and navigate from a symbol to its base and derived symbols, extension methods, or implementations. Multiple search results can be displayed in the Find Results window, making it easier to manage and use the search results.

Unit Testing

Rider supports running and debugging unit tests based on NUnit, XUnit, or MSTest in applications targeting .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Mono. You can explore tests, group them, break them down into individual sessions, see test output, and navigate to source code from stack traces.

Refactorings and Code Quality

The IDE offers extensive automated solution-wide code refactorings focused on reducing duplication and keeping the project structure neat and clean. It also includes continuous code quality analysis, highlighting issues before you compile and providing quick-fixes to resolve them automatically.

Plugin Ecosystem

Rider benefits from a rich plugin ecosystem, including plugins originally developed for the IntelliJ Platform and ReSharper. This ecosystem extends the functionality of the IDE, allowing you to customize it according to your needs.

Conclusion

In summary, JetBrains Rider combines advanced code analysis, AI-driven tools, and extensive development features to make it a powerful and efficient IDE for developers working on a variety of projects, including Unity, .NET, and more.