Brackets is a free and open source text editor developed at Adobe under the MIT license, featuring inline editing, live preview, and a wide range of extensions.
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Visual Studio
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Visual Studio (now in the 2022 edition) is a 64-bit IDE that makes it easier to work with bigger projects and complex workloads, boasting a fluid and responsive experience for users. The IDE features IntelliCode, its automatic code completion tools that understand code context and that can complete up to a whole line at once to drive accurate and confident coding.
Brackets can handle most text editing problems, at least if you have a file small enough that it opens. But with so many free and open-source editors out there, it is easy to have multiple tools that fit specific niches. If you are editing HTML and CSS, get Brackets.
It's useful for app development, debugging, and testing. I've been using it for two years and have seen it grow into a fantastic tool. All of the features, NuGet packages, and settings that enable different types of projects are fantastic. It also has a connection to Azure DevOps and Git. It's a fantastic product that's simple to use.
The Live Preview feature is extremely helpful. You can make tweaks to your CSS and then see how it affects the pge you're coding.
The recently added file tree feature is really a time saver. You can move files with a drop and drag feature without ever minimizing the program.
One of my favorite features is the ability to update the core program with extensions. Some of the extensions are simple, like adding themes, while others are a offer a little more assistance like creating Lorem Ipsum text for you.
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.
Certain settings and features can sometimes be challenging to locate. The interface isn't always intuitive.
Sometimes there are too many ways to do the same thing. For example, users can quickly add a new workspace in Source Control Explorer when a local path shows as "Not Mapped," but it doesn't indicate that the user might want to check the dropdown list of workspaces. The shortcut of creating a new workspace by clicking on the "Not Mapped" link can lead to developers creating too many workspaces and causing workspace management to become unwieldy. If the shortcut link were removed, the user would be forced to use the Workspace dropdown. While it can add an extra step to the process, workspaces would be managed more easily, and this would enforce consistency. At the very least, there should be a high-level administrative setting to hide the shortcut link.
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.
As far as usability, text editors are about as simple as you can get in the GUI world. The little features that make Brackets unique are intuitive enough that you don't really need a manual to find them and come to rely on them. If anybody knows enough about coding and markup enough to be looking for different editors, they will be up to speed before the download finishes.
The thing I like the most is Visual Studio doesn't suffer from Microsoft's over eager marketing department who feel they need to redesign the UI (think Office and windows) which forces users to loose large amounts of productivity having to learn software that they had previously known.
Brackets has a very extensive support site. Everything is organized nicely for easy navigation. If you can't find an answer you can easily file an issue with them and they will be quick to respond. What's cool is you can also message them on Slack, if you request an invite first. Slack is a very popular program right now so it's great having that integration.
Between online forums like StackOverflow, online documentation, MSDN forums, and the customer support options, I find it very easy to get support for Visual Studio IDE when I need it. If desired, one can also download the MSDN documentation about the IDE and have it readily available for any support needs.
Brackets can be considered as the barebones version of a more complex piece of software like Dreamweaver. We selected Brackets due to the simplicity of the UI and the ease of use. In our case we do not need all the additional tools and gadgets that other, more complex software packages offer. We need something that's quick, easy, uncluttered and focuses specifically on our needs, which are seeing code and editing code. In this case no frills and complex UIs are required.
I personally feel Visual Studio IDE has [a] better interface and [is more] user friendly than other IDEs. It has better code maintainability and intellisense. Its inbuilt team foundation server help coders to check on their code then and go. Better nugget package management, quality testing and gives features to extract TRX file as result of testing which includes all the summary of each test case.
ROI is great. The version of the tool we are using is free so not a whole of lot “investment” went into it. And the work we can accomplish with it more than makes up for the “cost.”
The ease of use makes it simple for anyone new to the tool to start using it and contributing to the project.
We've had hundreds of hours saved by the rapid development that Visual Studio provides.
We've lost some time in the Xamarin updates. However, being cross platform, we ultimately saved tons of time not having to create separate apps for iOS and Android.
