Notepad++ vs Visual Studio IDE

• Robust and full of features such as programming language specific settings
• Like being able to create new tabs, so I can easily go back to a prior project
• For a computer savvy person, its simple to use...simple menus, robust search features
• The ability to build and test macros, is more of a universal programming environment than a text editor

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• 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.

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• Stability - It can be buggy and when it crashes it can often be only remedied by reinstalling it. I've had to do that a number of times.
• Add-In Quality - It appears that some add-ins aren't up to snuff as the other add-ins are. They too can cause Notepad++ to crash.
• Appearance - It just appears outdated, not really a big deal.

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• 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.

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• Notepad++ has saved me time for quick coding jobs where I don't need to fire up a full-featured code editor.
• It saves me a lot of hassle by automating the formatting and sorting of text in a variety of use cases, especially for creating or editing mock data for projects.
• It is a free product (although you can donate to support its development) and has been a great tool for me to rely on over the years.

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• 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.

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