Microsoft Visual Studio vs. Xcode

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.

Incentivized

We are huge advocates of native iOS development and there is just real alternative when it comes to developing in Swift or Objective-C for the iPhone and iPad

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

• Debugging
• Profiling
• Great IDE

Incentivized

• Would be great if there was a better way to save and restore open tabs.
• The built-in test runner can be improved, for example, by adding the ability to save a set of commonly run tests, etc.
• Better integration for Microsoft SQL server would be great.

Incentivized

• Documentation
• Number of settings can be overwhelming
• Embedded help for settings and configuration
• Templates
• Collaboration
• Managing of credentials (although this has recently gotten better)

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

Using the Microsoft Visual Studio environment is very easy. You have many options to find what you need in the moment, or you can ask a question in the community and find an answer there to solve your problem. It is very interesting to learn about the community, as many people are developing with MS Visual Studio around the world.

Incentivized

Xcode occasionally exhibits some behaviors that are hard to explain, but are generally cleared by restarting the program. In an application this large and complex, I suppose this is somewhat expected. The sheer vastness of the frameworks collection has to be a huge management issue all by itself. However, those breaks in the flow can have impact on developer productivity.

Incentivized

Since we don't use the cloud based features of Xcode, it is basically available 24/7 for us. We don't need the extended compilation features that are offered in the cloud as our projects to this point have not been that large or complex. We have never seen a wholesale breakdown of Xcode availability at any point in our use of the product.

Incentivized

Every developer wants faster compiles, but that can be achieved by either going to the cloud or by provisioning the local station to a higher powered configuration. My only minor complaint is the amount of local mass storage that Xcode as a system consumes. This makes it interesting to set up a development environment on a midrange laptop, however it is easily managed with external storage at a reasonable price.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Eclipse is primarily used for Java development, and Android Studio is used for Android app development. Since our work is mainly focused on .NET applications, we use Microsoft Visual Studio to develop our software solutions. Microsoft Visual Studio IDE is way above the rest of the development tools by miles due to its ease of use and ease of software development.

Incentivized

Xcode is the clear choice in general circumstances in Apple echosphere application development (for instance, not for Java or web programming necessarily) primarily due to the fact that it is Apple's in-house tool. It received a lot of attention and is used by a huge audience of developers. It has the advantage of being free, heavily supported by Apple, tightly tied to OS and hardware changes, and benefits from significant Apple Intelligence enhancements in the latest version.

Incentivized

Xcode only loses points due to the occasional situation where it manages to somehow tie itself into a knot and starts to exhibit odd symptoms. This is almost always solved by simply saving progress and restarting the environment. Fortunately, that doesn't happen too frequently and is easily repaired while taking a short break to walk around and stretch.

Incentivized

• One of the most important components of Visual Studio IDE is team collaboration, which improves team productivity.
• It supports a wide range of languages. It's simple to add a library and have the IDE display autocomplete, suggestions, and errors while you code.
• Visual Studio has a lot of shortcuts, which helps me a lot by saving a lot of time. Its dark theme appeals to me. Intellisense has been quite beneficial.

• Xcode is free, and is supported at low cost by individual or organizational membership
• There are a lot of free resources available, which is particularly important to students and independent developers
• Since producing apps is not a core business function of the university, it is difficult to provide direct bottom-line tangible benefits, but frequently programming students come in with a basic understanding of Xcode already in place, which saves class time
• Producing standard structured code from a standard IDE makes it easier for sharing code with peer institutions
• Students expect to have university branded "helper" apps available, and Xcode makes it fairly easy to transport code from one contractor to another
• No negative impacts are immediately evident other than familiarization time with the IDE can be high if you try to know what everything does

Incentivized