Likelihood to Recommend My typical use is to edit HTML and CFM pages from prior projects, and use them to create new ones. So, I rarely use the tools for designing pages provided in this application. I have found the ability to preview a page very useful. I am aware of numerous features in this editor, that simpler editors would not provide. It has proven to be a great fit for my use.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Easy to use editing features Helpful analysis of code, and useful suggestions for corrections Very useful split-screen preview of HTML code Wizards to guide inserting tables, links, images, audio etc. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Maybe I could list a con if my use of it was more diverse and consistent. It does everything and more for my purposes, and in ways I Iike very much. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Return on Investment This editor certainly saves time in reducing my need to know and/or check coding minutiae. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots