Visual FoxPro (Discontinued) vs. JetBrains Rider vs. Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Legacy applications already on VFP are a good candidate. If you plan to move to iOS and Android apps, VFP is not for you. Also, in future access to VFP programmers may be limited. You could use VFP as a powerful database tool. I know of many programmers who love to exploit the features of VFP to create easy to use applications.

Initially you may think it’s not worth paying and that there are better free options, which is definitely a lie we once tried to live with. It has everything you may ever need in .NET world, code analysis and debugging works super well and all the SQL/noSQL related integrations are just next level compared to the competition. It’s worth every penny.

Incentivized

As a general workhorse IDE, Microsoft Visual Studio Codee is unmatched. Building on the early success of applications such as Atom, it has long been the standard for electron based IDEs. It can be outshone using IDEs that are dedicated to particular platforms, such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code for .net and the Jetbrains IDEs for Java, Python and others. For remote collaborative development, something like Zed is ahead of VSCode live share, which can be quite flakey.

Incentivized

• Treat data from files
• Reporting

Incentivized

• Provides a smooth, efficient IDE for developing .NET applications. Performance has been much better than Visual Studio in my experience.
• Integrated refactoring tools are really comprehensive and useful.
• Integrates with other JetBrains products such as TeamCity, Upsource, dotTrace, etc.

Incentivized

• Integrate with the git repository very well.
• Integrated copilot chat is very helpful to write code snippets and helps beginners to start with coding and development.
• Great library of available extensions is one of the best features in Microsoft Visual Studio Code.
• Dedicated Testing option to configure pytest and others are quite handy to use.

Incentivized

• Microsoft stopped selling this and stopped supporting it in 2014. It still works on Windows 10, but if you have a problem, you are on your own.
• The look and feel of screens and displayed text is getting a little dated.
• It's really designed for desktop/server environments rather than the cloud.

Incentivized

• Startup time. It takes a while to index big projects.
• Rarely it loses the intellisense and the only way to get it back is by restarting.
• Memory usage for big projects

Incentivized

• The customization of key combinations should be more accessible and easier to change
• The auxiliary panels could be minimized or as floating tabs which are displayed when you click on them
• A monitoring panel of resources used by Microsoft Visual Studio Code or plugins and extensions would help a lot to be able to detect any malfunction of these

Incentivized

Due to the performance and productivity benefits we get with Rider, we will continue to use it for the foreseeable future.

Incentivized

Solid tool that provides everything you need to develop most types of applications. The only reason not a 10 is that if you are doing large distributed teams on Enterprise level, Professional does provide more tools to support that and would be worth the cost.

Incentivized

There are several easy to use and powerful features of VFP that programmers like.

Rider is a great IDE with extensive C# refactoring support and .NET-specific knowledge. This is great for building .NET applications but for our purposes, the Unity specific suggestions are really helpful.

JetBrains Rider is great as an editing and debugging environment. It reliably connects to the Unity editor and allows debugging, which some IDEs are not as reliable at doing.

Incentivized

Microsoft Visual Studio Code earns a 10 for its exceptional balance of power and simplicity. Its intuitive interface, robust extension ecosystem, and integrated terminal streamline development. With seamless Git integration and highly customizable settings, it adapts perfectly to any workflow, making complex coding tasks feel effortless for beginners and experts alike.

Incentivized

Overall, Microsoft Visual Studio Code is pretty reliable. Every so often, though, the app will experience an unexplained crash. Since it is a stand-alone app, connectivity or service issues don't occur in my experience. Restarting the app seems to always get around the problem, but I do make sure to save and backup current work.

Incentivized

Microsoft Visual Studio Code is pretty snappy in performance terms. It launches quickly, and tasks are performed quickly. I don't have a lot of integrations other than CoPilot, but I suspect that if the integration partner is provisioned appropriately that any performance impact would be pretty minimal. It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles (unless you start adding plugins left and right).

Incentivized

Although MS has discontinued support of VFP there is a good community of programmers that are available for help. In fact we have several programmers at Apptread that are skilled not only in VFP but also .NET so that if there is a need to migrate some parts of applications to .NET , it is easy for us to do that.

The support forums and knowledge base are extensive and the JetBrains support staff respond quickly to new posts and help resolve issues. There is also a publicly accessible issue tracking system, which allows you to stay on top of any bug fixes or enhancement requests.

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Active development means filing a bug on the GitHub repo typically gets you a response within 4 days. There are plugins for almost everything you need, whether it be linting, Vim emulation, even language servers (which I use to code in Scala). There is well-maintained official documentation. The only thing missing is forums. The closest thing is GitHub issues, which typically has the answers but is hard to sift through -- there are currently 78k issues.

Incentivized

We are only using FoxPro because it is the only way to add custom plugins into the software we use to manage our stock. FoxPro is a semi-oriented object language and should clearly not be compared with recent technologies.

Incentivized

Rider is hands down smoother and way less glitchy than Visual Studio Enterprise. There are way more refactoring capabilities and spell check so that your code is readable, maintainable, and easy to follow. Since Rider is cross-platform, our developers are no longer constrained to only using Windows. We can now get a familiar development environment across Mac, Windows, or Linux!

Incentivized

Visual Studio Code stacks up nicely against Visual Studio because of the price and because it can be installed without admin rights. We don't exclusively use Visual Studio Code, but rather use Visual Studio and Visual Studio code depending on the project and which version of source control the given project is wired up to.

Incentivized

It is easily deployed with our Jamf Pro instance. There is actually very little setup involved in getting the app deployed, and it is fairly well self-contained and does not deploy a large amount of associated files. However, it is not particularly conducive to large project, multi-developer/department projects that involve some form of central integration.

Incentivized

• Positive impact is that the value of FoxPro applications has continued to increase over the years, so we are in high demand for our services.
• Negative impact is that sometimes you have difficult to support scenarios where you might have to spend many hours to just keep something functional.
• A negative impact is that this language is taught in very few places, either in schools, or private learning centers.

Incentivized

• Built in Resharper into the license fee, great, you likely want it
• Demands less resources from computer so needing a beefy work computer might not be the case, save money on equipment.

Incentivized

• Saves money by replacing suites of tools such as Visual Studio, IntelliJ, etc.
• Speeds development time and developer environment setup time
• Strengthens code quality with integrated autoformatting and linting
• Strengths Git practices by keeping version control tightly connected with the code

Incentivized