Plugins

Learn the basics of the Rider plugin marketplace from a Visual Studio + ReSharper user's perspective.

The Visual Studio extension ecosystem is a rich one, and it is where productivity tools like ReSharper have an opportunity to enhance the development experience of .NET developers everywhere. If you use any extension other than ReSharper, you're likely familiar with the Manage Extensions dialog.

Visual Studio Extensions dialog

ReSharper users will likely also have seen the ReSharper Extensions dialog, accessible under Extensions \| ReSharper \| Extension Manager....

Visual Studio ReSharper Extensions

Let's talk about IDE plugins, as they are closest in concept to Visual Studio extensions. Rider's plugins are accessible via the Plugins section in Settings. Developers can find many of the ReSharper extensions in the JetBrains Marketplace. Since ReSharper is the engine that powers many of Rider's editor features, most of these plugins "just work".

JetBrains Rider Plugin Marketplace dialog

A bonus for Rider users is we aren't limited to plugins that primarily target .NET development. Since Rider is part of the IntelliJ family of products, developers can benefit from plugins designed for IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, GoLand, RubyMine, WebStorm, and CLion. JetBrains ships many of the features in Rider as plugins deriving from other products.

The plugins you most likely be interested in include support for JavaScript frameworks, themes, language support, and editor productivity enhancements. The JetBrains Marketplace offers developers to explore and adopt plugins not available in the Visual Studio Extension ecosystem. Rider isn't only a .NET development environment; with the help of plugins, it is any development environment developers need it to be. That's powerful!