If you had to create something like ReSharper, where would you start? [closed]

Question

If you had to create a plugin like ReSharper for Visual Studio, where would you start?
(not talking about each and every feature, but I am trying to just get a skeleton of it going).

Answer 1

As of beginning of 2007, JetBrains guys estimated ReSharper to be around 30 man-years (this is a Google Translated version of a post on a Russian forum). They also say that it's not enough to be proficient in building compilers: they consider the most complex parts to be caches, AST transactions, AST contexts, etc. Visual Studio integration was not the most sophisticated thing technically: it was just a matter of reading tons of docs.

So this is basically it: Visual Studio integration and AST managements will be the most complex parts to implement to get a skeleton of ReSharper.