Visual Studio IDE Reviews

The major complaint I have with Visual Studio is that the user interface does not handle screen movement well at all if the SSIS steps extend beyond a single screen. It is very cumbersome to move steps around and you cannot even double click on a step to edit it because after the first click the step moves and you wind up opening a different step which happens to be wherever the cursor lands just prior to your second click. It is very frustrating and if Microsoft developers are reading this and my description of the problems are not clear, then I would be happy to discuss this on a phone call or via email to ensure these issues are fixed.

The user interface can be a bit daunting to new people but the myriad of training videos and examples more than makes up for this weakness.

Being a developer tool that's always being enhanced with new features, sometimes it can crash--save frequently just to be sure--you should be doing this anyway.

It can be a bit of a heavy program, especially if you need to open multiple solutions.

There's no support for opening multiple solutions in one 'program,' which is a bummer.

Sometimes the more advanced functionality/hotkeys can be hard to remember, so some way to move through the program in a more intuitive way would be nice.

Web development needs some help. Make no mistake, the world has moved to the web. Some of the more annoying aspects of Visual Studio is that you do not get the proper intellisense in your HTML for javascript. If you live in the web, you will be using JavaScript and this will start to annoy you after a while. Debugging your JavaScript will need to be done in the browser. While it DOES have the functionality to debug your JavaScript in the IDE, it's painfully slow, doesn't always work right, and did I mention it's slow? We do not have slow machines, this should not be a problem.

Xamarin "updates" seem to break your project frequently. We never could figure out why it would happen, but it seems like every update to Xamarin would break something and the project would stop building. Fixing it was a combination of deleting folder, app data folder, the project completely and re-getting it from TFS. Weird stuff that many people seem to experience, not just us.

It's very large. Microsoft thought of just about everything with VS and they included it all out of the box. The installation files are massive and take hours to download on a slow connection.

Resource hungry. VS uses a lot of system resources.

Complex. One of its strengths can also be viewed as a weakness. As you learn the platform, it can be overwhelming trying to figure out everything that's included.

The updates are breaking sometimes VS permissions. I have set VS to run as administrator, but sometimes after an update, I need to go to executable file and set it again.

VS 2017 does not work well sometimes with the MVC 4 applications. It is showing (underlining) errors in code viewer where the errors do not exist. The VS team was not able to fix this.

There is no good plugin for SASS compilation and Workbench (available only up to version 2015) does not work very well.

VS could be faster, especially when building applications.

It's come quite a long way, but there are still some performance issues if you add extensions like ReSharper (though that's more JetBrains' issue than Visual Studio's).

If you aren't careful, you may end up enabling refactor-on-save if you play with some of the settings (found this out the hard way -- easy to undo, but be careful).

The menus could be a little more intuitive

Sometime it freezes or hangs for no reason and a reboot is required, happens much less in newer versions

Better Git integration

The files can not be searched; the user has to search by the content of the file rather than the file name.

It uses up a lot of resources in the system, which could be an issue with some of the systems out there.

The installation process takes a large amount of time.

Infrequent crashes and hangs are concerning

Some features are difficult or non-intuitive to use like setup projects

Combined with Resharper, Visual Studio is particularly useful. If Resharper functionality was in Visual Studio, purchase of this utility would not be necessary. I am aware that there are many Resharper features in VS already (refactoring, etc).

Additional powerful controls in MVC would be appreciated.

Licensing is a bit costly.

Sometimes it slows down the system when we are going to build a project.

Uses a lot of memory and size constraints on the system.

Hardware issues- Compilation codes work on different machines and systems according to the operating system and processor.

Too heavy to install.

Not created for database management.

Components are hard to install and always changing.

Performance is a concern, especially if you use many components installed simultaneously.

A large number of functionalities can turn your development environment confused.

No stashe with GIT

Learning curve for beginners

Occasionally, it just breaks with very vague error messages.

We encounter issues with git and IDE where files are locked and I need to use git bash.

While stability in recent years is so much better, Visual Studio still crashes from time-to-time

Better feature parity between C# and Typescript

Since each team at Microsoft builds their own tooling, there are feature sets that you think would work similarly (EG, web apps vs Azure Functions), but they work completely differently.

Anyone who has the displeasure of working with SSRS or SSIS knows... Visual Studio is pretty bad for building SSIS flows and building SSRS reports. Those two features feel half-baked, and there are usually compile-time errors between VS2013 and newer versions of VS depending on your SSIS package.

Updates occur regularly and often eat up disk space and/or cause instability. You may want to avoid being on the latest and greatest release of VS just because it can cause all sorts of head-aches. Over time, you'll probably notice decreased disk space - the VS updates usually eat disk and never give any of it back.

VS is very heavy - though load-times have gotten better since 2008, it does still require a lot of resources to do your development. If you're still using a traditional hard disk vs a SSD you may find build and launch times particularly slow.

Feeling unnatural installation in a non-Windows environment.

Intellisense could be better, it works pretty good with Resharper.

Command line for .Net framework projects is poor.

Visual Studio is a very complex tool and some developers have a hard time usig it well. For these developers I show some of the items they need to perform and suggest they not go too deaply in the tool until they get used to using the tool.

Visual Studio has so many features some think it is a draw back to its use. As I mentioned above, it is better to keep to simpler features until you truly feel you can move on to more complex features.

Only a developer who truely understands load testing should attempt to run and then interpret the results of a load test using Visual Studio. If a developer does not have a good grasp on how a computer actually runs they will misinterpret a load test.

It could be better at refactorings. With Resharper, this isn't an issue though.

Sometimes Nuget can be buggy and say installed something but did not

More themes? Purely aesthetic but more os a choice would be nice.

While source control is great I feel an interface-like source tree would be better

VS .NET IDE uses a lot of memory, so be prepare to get to your programmers a very capable PC ( >16 GB of RAM the better)

Installation process for the core components is easy, but if you need other components they can be hard to find in the components tree in the installer. And, the more libraries and components you install, the more memory you'll need.

It has a lot of hardware requirements.

It consumes a lot of memory, and even more when you work on large projects with different architectures.

It only works well for Windows.

Visual Studio IDE provides demo versions that the user can use to explore and adapt to this development environment, but these demo versions have limited functions, which leads the user to want to buy the full versions of this product. It is a commercial strategy that many Development companies implement in their products to assess the impact they generate on users.

I think updates of the IDE should be done more seamlessly as current new updates of the IDE requires that you have to download huge files of approximately 5GB