Adobe AIR vs Visual Studio IDE

• Adobe AIR supports a lot of commonly needed features for mobile app development.
• It is fairly stable and consistent once you learn how to use it.
• It is cross-platform and is supported by some useful third-party plugins.

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• Rock solid intellisense. For C# and VB.Net code, the intellisense provided by Visual Studio is hands down the best. If you find that you have a hard time remembering parameters of functions, or what object names were, the intellisense will rescue you and help me be an efficient developer.
• Super fast and simple to use debugger for C# and VB. Everything in the debugger is handed to you on a silver platter. When you stop on a break point, it immediately shows you the local variables, the call stack, and even your current memory usage. Setting up watch variables is super simple and you can even make breakpoints conditional so it will only stop on certain conditions.
• Hides the tedious tasks. There are quite a few things like publishing, creating click once deployments, and adding/removing settings in the project files that can be really time consuming when trying to do it by hand (such as if you don't have access to Visual Studio and you need to make changes). Visual Studio hides all the tedium from you by making nice point and click interfaces to get things done quickly.

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• It is cumbersome to update if you use Flash Builder.
• It still relies on Flash and vector graphics and therefore can have poor performance unless you are using a third-party library such as Starling.
• It is updated somewhat slowly and is still missing some useful features such as controller support.

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• The updates are breaking sometimes VS permissions. I have set VS to run as administrator, but sometimes after an update, I need to go to executable file and set it again.
• VS 2017 does not work well sometimes with the MVC 4 applications. It is showing (underlining) errors in code viewer where the errors do not exist. The VS team was not able to fix this.
• There is no good plugin for SASS compilation and Workbench (available only up to version 2015) does not work very well.
• VS could be faster, especially when building applications.

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• Using Adobe AIR allows your team to be comprised of Flash/ActionScript 3 developers, which can be easy/cheap to find compared to other disciplines (based on location). This can lower the bottom-line in terms of engineering costs.
• As the Adobe AIR SDK is free to use, the cost of entry is basically free. Additionally, the Adobe AIR SDK may be used in conjunction with a free IDE, such as FlashDevelop, making the entire stack completely free to use.
• One negative impact is the stigma against Adobe Flash/AIR. Due to Adobe's less than stellar track record (in terms of support and security) with both Flash and Flash Mobile, there are numerous clients that we've dealt with, that refused to approve Adobe AIR as a tool.

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• Visual Studio has allowed the developement group at my company to develop numerous applications keeping us in the top number of contractors performing this work.
• Visual Studio Enterprise can be quite expensive so only purchase the Enterprise e-version for your most experienced developers. The Professional version of Visual Studio is quite capable of do the work for less experienced developers and is much lower in cost.
• If your company is required to develop software that will be run on Windows-based workstations or servers, you must have Visual Studio to develop with. Any lesser tool will just not be enough.

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