Visual Studio (now in the 2022 edition) is a 64-bit IDE that makes it easier to work with bigger projects and complex workloads, boasting a fluid and responsive experience for users. The IDE features IntelliCode, its automatic code completion tools that understand code context and that can complete up to a whole line at once to drive accurate and confident coding.
$45
per month
Windsurf
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Windsurf (formerly Codeium) is an AI dev tool that is self-hosted for security, with features including rapid code autocomplete, in-editor AI chat assistant, repo natural language search, end-to-end data encryption.
$15
per month for 500 prompt credits/month Equivalent to 2,000 GPT-4.1 prompts (4 prompts per credit)
Pricing
Microsoft Visual Studio
Windsurf
Editions & Modules
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Pro
$15
per month 500 credits/mo
Team
$30
per month per user (500 credits/user/mo)
Enterprise
$60
per month per user (up to 200 users & 1,000 credits/user/mo)
Windsurf would be more comparable to GitHub Copilot or Perplexity to me. I think it's more of a pure code debugging line by line than some of the other tools listed above, however, they all have some capabilities to rewrite and test new coding. It boils down to what toolset …
When working with base C# code for desktop and web projects, then Microsoft Visual Studio is ideal as it provides the libraries and interfaces needed to quickly create, test and deploy solutions. It is when slightly more complex scenarios are required that issues can arise. The built-in integration for things like PowerBI Paginated Reports and dashboards is far from ideal.
If you already have technical knowledge and understanding of coding, Windsurf could be a valuable platform to debug and rewrite code. It was helpful to me to expand coding, since I am not a traditionally programmer. I was able to enhance my base code and functionality much quicker than manually trying.
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.
I love the overall usability of Microsoft Visual Studio. I’ve been using this IDE for more than 20 years, and I’ve seen it evolve by leaps and bounds. Today, with AI and code-suggestion/completion features, developers no longer need to remember countless libraries, methods, or language syntax, or invest a huge amount of programming effort to complete a project. It truly offers everything a developer needs to program, debug, test, and deploy in a single IDE.
Windsurf is a good tool for developers with more than basic coding skills. I would recommend it as a tool to quickly mitigate coding errors and issues. I did not take a deeper dive into the integrated extensions, but the library of extensions appear to be solid. An experience developer could quickly launch this platform, scan and test coding, and resolve issues quickly. I did not test this for larger code sets.
There are many resources available supporting Visual Studio IDE. Microsoft whitepapers, forum posts, and online Visual Studio documentation. There are countless demonstration videos available, as well. If users are having issues, they can call Microsoft Support, but depending on the company's agreement with Microsoft, the number of included support calls will vary from organization to organization. I've found that Microsoft support calls can be hit or miss depending on who you get, but they can usually get you with the right support person for your issue.
IT is very complicated to understand all the functions that the environment has if you are not familiar with this type of development environments. It is important to select a good in-person training to achieve to understand all the possibilities and the capacity of the application. In this case, you will be able to develop a lot type of different applications.
If you are not accustomed to develop in this type of development environments it would be complicated to follow all the parts of the course because if the course does not include a great tour with all the concepts to develop you will not have the option to understand all the functions.
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.
Windsurf would be more comparable to GitHub Copilot or Perplexity to me. I think it's more of a pure code debugging line by line than some of the other tools listed above, however, they all have some capabilities to rewrite and test new coding. It boils down to what toolset you are most comfortable with. I typically will work with two platforms with the same issue to see how it is approached and the differences.
Using the integration between Visual Studio and our source control service, the cost of re-work and losing code is drastically reduced.
Paid versions of Visual Studio enable developers to be so much more productive than hacked-together open source solutions that it's hard to imagine developing in Windows without it.
When combined with support subscriptions and the vast array of free online help options available, Visual Studio saves our developers time by keeping them coding and testing, not wasting their time trying to guess their way out of problems or spend endless hours online hoping to find answers.
