Anaconda vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

I have asked all my juniors to work with Anaconda and Pycharm only, as this is the best combination for now. Coming to use cases: 1. When you have multiple applications using multiple Python variants, it is a really good tool instead of Venv (I never like it). 2. If you have to work on multiple tools and you are someone who needs to work on data analytics, development, and machine learning, this is good. 3. If you have to work with both R and Python, then also this is a good tool, and it provides support for both.

Incentivized

When working with base C# code for desktop and web projects, then Microsoft Visual Studio is ideal as it provides the libraries and interfaces needed to quickly create, test and deploy solutions. It is when slightly more complex scenarios are required that issues can arise. The built-in integration for things like PowerBI Paginated Reports and dashboards is far from ideal.

Incentivized

• Installing packages is very easy with Anaconda. Anaconda comes with 'anaconda navigator', a terminal-like utility from which you can easily install R packages and python libraries.
• Launching R and python IDEs as well as Jupyter notebooks from anaconda navigator is simple, and Anaconda makes it very easy to keep these packages up-to-date.
• I really like the fact that if you don't want to install the full version of Anaconda, you can opt to install a lightweight version (called Miniconda) that includes less python libraries and only core conda. I've installed it when I didn't want to take up as much disk space as Anaconda requires, but it works just the same.

Incentivized

• Since Microsoft offers a free Community Edition of the IDE many of our new developers have used it at home or school and are very familiar with the user interface, requiring little training to move up to the paid, enterprise-friendly editions we use.
• The online community support for Visual Studio is outstanding, as solid or better than any other commercial or open-source project software.
• Microsoft continuously keeps the product up to date and has maintained a history of doing so. They use it internally for their own development so there is little chance it will ever fall out of favor and become unsupported.

Incentivized

• More graphics need in Spyder book. If you work for couple of years then you will be bored with the graphics.
• Extra tools are required for making it secure. We uses extra tools for adding Username /Password to Jupyter.
• R Studio Hangs a lot when open from Anaconda Navigator.

Incentivized

• Would be great if there was a better way to save and restore open tabs.
• The built-in test runner can be improved, for example, by adding the ability to save a set of commonly run tests, etc.
• Better integration for Microsoft SQL server would be great.

Incentivized

It's really good at data processing, but needs to grow more in publishing in a way that a non-programmer can interact with. It also introduces confusion for programmers that are familiar with normal Python processes which are slightly different in Anaconda such as virtualenvs.

Incentivized

VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.

Incentivized

I am giving this rating because I have been using this tool since 2017, and I was in college at that time. Initially, I hesitated to use it as I was not very aware of the workings of Python and how difficult it is to manage its dependency from project to project. Anaconda really helped me with that. The first machine-learning model that I deployed on the Live server was with Anaconda only. It was so managed that I only installed libraries from the requirement.txt file, and it started working. There was no need to manually install cuda or tensor flow as it was a very difficult job at that time. Graphical data modeling also provides tools for it, and they can be easily saved to the system and used anywhere.

Incentivized

Using the Microsoft Visual Studio environment is very easy. You have many options to find what you need in the moment, or you can ask a question in the community and find an answer there to solve your problem. It is very interesting to learn about the community, as many people are developing with MS Visual Studio around the world.

Incentivized

Anaconda provides fast support, and a large number of users moderate its online community. This enables any questions you may have to be answered in a timely fashion, regardless of the topic. The fact that it is based in a Python environment only adds to the size of the online community.

Incentivized

There are many resources available supporting Visual Studio IDE. Microsoft whitepapers, forum posts, and online Visual Studio documentation. There are countless demonstration videos available, as well. If users are having issues, they can call Microsoft Support, but depending on the company's agreement with Microsoft, the number of included support calls will vary from organization to organization. I've found that Microsoft support calls can be hit or miss depending on who you get, but they can usually get you with the right support person for your issue.

Incentivized

IT is very complicated to understand all the functions that the environment has if you are not familiar with this type of development environments. It is important to select a good in-person training to achieve to understand all the possibilities and the capacity of the application. In this case, you will be able to develop a lot type of different applications.

Incentivized

If you are not accustomed to develop in this type of development environments it would be complicated to follow all the parts of the course because if the course does not include a great tour with all the concepts to develop you will not have the option to understand all the functions.

Incentivized

One of the main competitors to Anaconda can be Google products such as Colab. Colab gives you the flexibility to handle large datasets gives it an edge over Anaconda. But again, the ease of access and usability of Anaconda stacks up against Colab. Besides, Anaconda relies more on your machine which makes it safe to use.

Incentivized

Eclipse is primarily used for Java development, and Android Studio is used for Android app development. Since our work is mainly focused on .NET applications, we use Microsoft Visual Studio to develop our software solutions. Microsoft Visual Studio IDE is way above the rest of the development tools by miles due to its ease of use and ease of software development.

Incentivized

• Positive impact - Multiple options for data presenting , visualizing and sharing. (Eg: R-Markdown).
• Positive impact - Ease of access to build complex machine learning models. (I work in NLP, it has multiple built in models to analyze the various contexts).
• Positive impact - Conda package let's to deal with external packages which can be used in Jupyter.

Incentivized

• One of the most important components of Visual Studio IDE is team collaboration, which improves team productivity.
• It supports a wide range of languages. It's simple to add a library and have the IDE display autocomplete, suggestions, and errors while you code.
• Visual Studio has a lot of shortcuts, which helps me a lot by saving a lot of time. Its dark theme appeals to me. Intellisense has been quite beneficial.