What can I do to improve CodeRush Xpress responsiveness?

Question

I've used CodeRush Xpress for roughly a couple of years now, and I find it very useful.

However, I don't think I've ever seen it performing well in terms of responsiveness; when I press Ctrl+` to open the refactoring context menu, it generally freezes the IDE for a few seconds. If I subsequently open the context menu again, it doesn't freeze the IDE, but it still takes about one second for the excessively fancy menus to be drawn on the screen.

I've experienced this on several different computers and with both Visual Studio 2010 and 2012. The most performant computer I've run it on has an Intel Q6600 quad core processor running at 3.0GHz.

For a productivity tool, I think this is a problem; it's supposed to be saving me time!

In terms of software configuration, what can I do to improve the performance of CodeRush Xpress?

Note for those who like closing questions: Please consider that software runs predictably, and I believe it's perfectly reasonable that changing certain options can result in performance improvements for all or most users due to this predictable nature. For example, I suspect that performance may be improved by disabling some of the fancy UI effects.

Answer 1

First, I suggest contacting support@devexpress.com. They can help you narrow down the performance issue and fix it quickly. The performance problem is likely caused by the availability check of a code provider or refactoring that is taking too long to determine its availability in your solution.

A few things:

1. Support may be able to provide you with a more recent version of CodeRush Xpress that already has the performance issue resolved.
2. DevExpress has discontinued the freely available CodeRush Xpress, which means no new versions will come out. You can purchase the full version of CodeRush, and starting with version 13.1 CodeRush includes asynchronously-populated Refactoring and Code menus. This improves the responsiveness of the Code/Refactor menu even in huge projects.