Codeanywhere is a Cloud IDE with the features of a Desktop IDE. Codeanywhere enables users to set up a workflow in any way desired. The features needed for coding tasks are built into Codeanywhere, including support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, code refactoring, and embedded Git. Languages included are popular programming ones such as C, C#, C++, CSS, HTTP, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL.
$6
per month 1 container
Visual Studio
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
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.
If you're looking for a VS Code-like online environment with containers to spin up a dev environment or execute code and scripts it is a good fit. The environments are very customizable, and, all said and done, the price is fair. If you're looking for a remote code editor that allows you to connect via SFTP/SSH and edit the remote files, it isn't quite as seamless as it used to be. I still haven't found any all-cloud alternative, but it could be better.
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.
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.
Since some updates a couple of years ago, using Codeanywhere as a remote code editor rather than a container-based development environment has been more cumbersome and difficult.
The modular nature of connections and containers seems like a good idea, but they don't always work properly.
It's difficult sometimes to share a connection or container together with a collaborator.
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.
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.
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.
I've used CodeTasty, which is much more of a straight remote code editor, but their dev team is entirely unresponsive, and I became uncomfortable storing credentials with them, so I pulled everything from them and went back to Codeanywhere. VS code is similar but not fully online. While I know that they've released a fully online version, I haven't had the time or wherewith-all to make it work in the capacity I need. Codeanywhere is still the best solution I've found.
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.
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.
