Likelihood to Recommend The Welkin Suite is a great IDE compared to the alternatives out there. If you need to code in Salesforce and you want a mostly seamless environment, then The Welkin Suite is the best option available, in my opinion. I have also been using it for Apex Tests and find that the tools are really good for measuring code coverage and highlighting those areas that are uncovered.
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 Local History - Without having to setup GitHub this has been a time saver! AutoComplete Saves the entire project at once 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 It would be nice if IDE feature releases were timed to coincide with Salesforce releases (i.e. make Lightning Web Components available on the day they become available in Salesforce instances). The IDE can be a bit buggy especially when you have several windows of the IDE open to different Salesforce instances at the same time on one machine. Sometimes, when you click to retrieve your data too soon, before the program has a chance to ask you to connect to the instance, it can cause the IDE to freeze. 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 In general, when you need support there is someone there to give you an answer. I think there could be an improvement in this area, but it's hard to provide a substantial amount of support for a product that is charging roughly $15 a month. Do I feel I get more than $15 worth of support value when I need to request it? Yes.
Read full review 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 Read full review 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 The ability to recover and compare to local history Reliable vs. open source alternatives! 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