Devart dotConnect vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

dotConnect for MySQL is suitable if you work with .net technologies and frameworks to develop applications but do not want to use SQL Server. This is a very common scenario and the Express edition can solve this problem if you need only basic connectivity features. If high performance is a crucial requirement for you, it may be a real concern. Maybe paid editions can deliver better performance, but you will need to deal with relevant costs.

Incentivized

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.

• Easy to use, client report-friendly
• Easy integration when accessing multiple SQL servers on the client side
• Pulls/connects easily from any application

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

• Better troubleshooting for errors in Visual Studio integration mode
• Improvements in performance
• Documentation could be better

Incentivized

• 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.

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

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We had been using an outsourced company for such projects until we decided to hire our own team and do all of this DB work in-house. So this was our first year of experience with this product. So far, we're very pleased, as are our clients.

Incentivized

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.

• Low-cost product for basic connectivity features
• Allows us to deliver applications for clients that requires MySQL as a database
• Allows us keep using our development tools and IDE due to integration capabilities (mainly Visual Studio)
• Easy to use

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized