Moron learning? Yes, today I wanted to talk about how I am going about learning ReSharper.

A colleague of mine, after reading my last post on some basic ReSharper features, asked me how I’d learnt about these features, how much time it took, and whether there were any good tutorials out there.

Short version: printing keymap and playing around, not much, and haven’t really looked. Of course, my verbosity knows little of and cares not for boundaries of any sort, so read on if you want the self-indulgent version.

The way I have gone about learning ReSharper it pretty simple. First I printed the keyboard shortcuts I find on the ReSharper documentation page (there is also a white paper there that covers the major features), and highlighted the ones I thought I would use regularly, and tried incorporating them into my coding sessions (Ctrl + Shft + R to open the Refactor This menu for example). Then I just had a quick look through the quickly-accessed ReSharper options whenever I had to do something “resharpery”.

For example, if I had to do something that could potentially be done by an automatic refactoring, I would highlight the relevant section and hit Ctrl + Shft + R to see what refactorings ReSharper could offer, like extract a method, changing a signature, introducing a variable etc. I would also hit Alt + Enter whenever I saw the Quick Fix icon , and had a look at the options provided.

I have learnt a lot, and continue to learn a lot this way. It has been a pretty low-intervention strategy – it does not interfere with my normal work, but I still end up finding out a lot due to the easily discoverable nature of many of the ReSharper features.

If you want more in-depth tutorials there is the 31 days of ReSharper series (was for version 2.5 or so I think, but still relevant), and there are probably some more floating around the Net.