What's Next? -- Life After Release

We released ReSharper 4 in June and I didn't post since then. First, I was on vacation and it was great. Then, our team left the city to spend 4 full days discussing ReSharper future, inventing new features, building plans and coordinating efforts. Awesome experience, I must say. After that, we focused on preparing maintenance release 4.0.1 which will be out as soon as we verify it against recently released Visual Studio 2008 SP1. Now we are starting to work towards 4.5 release, which is tentatively planned to be released by the end of the year, or may be at the beginning of year 2009. So, what are we going to do?

Please note, that it is preliminary plan only and is subject to change at any time.

1. More performance
2. Less memory usage

Yes, we are going to spend about four months tackling performance and memory issues, optimizing various parts of our product and improving architecture to prepare for the next major step forward.

In addition to the overall product quality improvement, we are going to improve some existing features, based on your feedback, and add some new.

3. New refactorings are being developed, which will allow you to perform more intelligent solution-wide code transformation. We didn't finalize the list yet, but most likely they will be from "Inline" family.

4. Enhanced setup for naming conventions which will be supported by all ReSharper features. We are not going to implement all functionality of the AgentSmith plugin, but we want to stop naming issues experienced by some of ReSharper users once and for all.

5. Visual Build - new feature to display build process inside Visual Studio in a better way. Think "Unit Test Session" style, but for building your solution. This feature will also lay the foundation for future features, like optimizing build procedure.

6. Visual Basic 9 support. Our cross-language refactorings and editing experience enhancements will fully support VB9 constructs, like anonymous functions and XML literals.

As usual, once we perform all potentially dangerous changes to our code base and stabilize the build, we will start publishing nightly builds for your Early Access Pleasure.

PS: If you didn't express your opinion about ReSharper 4 on Visual Studio Gallery, you can let other people know what do you think via rating and review functionality recently added to this site.