Visual Studio

Debugging

Source code maintanance

Error handling mechanism in terms of building the solution.

If the existing source code do not have solution created, it is hard to link that folder with VS. We only can see the code , but cannot build it.

Not easy to define "user defied build rules" for our project. Empty Project option did not help everytime.

Nowadays, in latest versions of the Visual Studio IDE, it is hard to get speed of switching between two tabs or windows within one solution.

I like how the tabs and panels are organized; everything is gathered together so you can find what you're looking for quickly.

If you can't find something, there's a thorough search engine that searches all of Visual Studio's features.

The Team Foundation Server feature is fantastic since it allows us to easily deploy and roll back changes on the server.

Visual Studio is good at debugging, however it can get stuck at times, requiring you to either stop debugging or restart Visual Studio.

The application is heavy and takes a long time to load.

Visual Studio has a wonderful UI, but it feels a little difficult, particularly for newcomers. This is a minor flaw, but it still feels like it could be better.

Debugging client-side JavaScript is so easy in Visual Studio. Other IDEs such as Jet Brains WebStorm provide some form of debugging, but noting is easier than Visual Studio. In particular, its the only tool that lets me put a break point in client-side script and walk the HTTP request into a Web API and back.

With other lighter-weight tools, even Visual Studio Code, you have to dig around to find the right way to include 3rd party libraries or frameworks into your code. With Visual Studio NuGet is always handy since its built-in to the IDE. The other nice feature is after you add a package through NuGet, it searches your code and alerts you to other packages that might need upgrading.

Our company uses Team Foundation Server for source control and using the Visual Studio IDE makes it completely transparent. Its so simple to bring down a fresh copy of your code, check-in a file or compare versions of a file.

While we use the Enterprise edition, it's great that Microsoft offers a slimmed-down community edition for others. This makes it easier for college students to get familiar with the Visual Studio IDE for free and then later makes it easier to transition over to the Professional or Enterprise Editions when they enter the business world.

Because AngularJS and Angular have taken the development world nearly overnight, it would be great if Microsoft updated Visual Studio to provide better support for debugging Angular and AngularJS code. Years ago, a free third-party plug-in existed called Batarang which helped developers see the contents of Angular object. Unfortunately, as Google moved forward in development this tool was ultimately broken. Visual Studio lacks real support for providing debugging tools for Google's popular front-end framework.

Software developers are either C# or Visual Basic developers...though its rare to find a VB person anymore. Unfortunately, the Visual Studio IDE never lets you choose which of the two language to install. As a C# developer it really would be great if I could tell the installation module to not install VB or its project libraries.

The code snippet feature in Visual Studio needs upgrading and wizards so it becomes a first class citizen in the IDE. Visual Studio would become so much more useful if I could right-click snippets of code and with a single click tell the IDE to add them to my snippets library. This would kick off a wizard that could help me edit the snippet to make it more reusable. Today if you want to use the Snippet Editor you really have to dig around the web to figure out how to make it work for you.

One-stop development shop. Centralized location for all development-related tools and workflow.

Continue work offline, disconnected from the network if needed.

More robust build administration than what is offered on the web

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.

Error finding and debugging.

Number of extensions for customize our IDE.

User friendly interface with dark and light mood.

Rich toolbox for interface design.

High memory use.

Long startup time.

Cost is higher than other developing case tools.

Provides a smooth, efficient IDE for developing .NET applications.

Debugging tools are better than any other IDE I've used in the past.

Has a great selection of extensions, e.g Resharper and OzCode.

Visual Studio can be clunky and slow at times, much longer loading and building than Rider.

Having the manually save after becoming used to auto-saving and automatic local history is an annoyance and constant fear.

Build Web and Cloud applications for free.

Large selection of development languages, i.e. Visual Basic, C#, PHP, Objective-C, JavaScript and Visual C++.

Heavyweight tool that can feel overwhelming or confusing when first using it.

Learning curve of the IDE can be daunting for beginning programmers.

Very complete feature set for what it can do.

The interface is easy to understand and can be made into dark mode OR light mode.

The output is nicely formatted, and the code highlighting/linting is excellent.

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.

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.

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.

SSIS processes records in an orderly manner.

SSIS has many sources and destination choices and we have extended the base SSIS features using a product called Task Factory from SentryOne/Pragmatic Works.

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.

Support for open source software development languages and tools. We can use the same IDE to develop for non-Microsoft technologies.

Hundreds of components to improve development with a lot of technologies, that can be selected and installed individually.

Strong WEB documentation and training.

Fully integrated with Microsoft Team Foundation Server, running well in SCRUM scenarios.

Great software version control and share (checkin/checkout/merge).

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

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

Ability to add plug-ins that support non-Microsoft solutions (such as PHP and Python).

Power to organize and support even large enterprise applications.

Well-structured. The built-in organization of VS makes it easy to keep track of complex projects.

Intuitive. The controls in VS are easy to find and use.

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.

Ability to write Unit Tests.

Ample amount of online community support. Every time you run into any issue, 8 out of 10 times the solution could be found in the online forums.

Integration with a large number of languages like Java, Python, PHP.

Great design of the reports generated.

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.

Intellisense is amazingly helpful in being able to code without needing to reference a manual.

GIT integration along with TFS for source control and the build/release/deploy process

Projects and solutions and the provided templates

NuGet is another feature that is essential.

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.

Visual Studio adapts to any programming language, including many features and extensions that make it an excellent IDE. It also has tools that facilitate and improve the user experience and allows you to easily filter and search only one type of element.

It has its own version control that allows you to maintain local change history.

Is easy to set up and is complete for software development.

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.

Code editing with best-of-class auto-complete, refactoring, and shortcuts

Managing source control branches, work items, etc, fully integrated with Azure DevOps

SQL Management and Cloud resource management

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.

Integration into git and in particular VSTS (now named Azure DevOps) is amazing. The experience is seamless and works very well.

Backward compatibility is better than ever, so there's less risk of breaking applications as you upgrade from different versions of Visual Studio.

The development experience in Visual Studio is second-to-none. This really is the gold standard for IDEs with tight integration into the Microsoft stack, built-in unit testing tools, debugging and diagnostics capabilities, ... the list goes on. Everything is at the developer's finger-tips.

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.

Its design and graphical interface are particularly sublime, and you can modify and adapt them to personal specifications.

It is one of the best editors to work with C ++ and C #, allowing competent synchronization and interesting functionality.

Facilitates faster work by having a fast and retro-compatible AI with other development and design apps.

Its resource consumption can become excessive, since it lacks an automatic garbage collector.

It is limited to a few programming languages ​​and programming desktop apps, so its potential is shortened.

You can't export the projects or source codes to other systems or distributions that are not Windows OS.

Great integration of tools to support the entire software development process.

Support for multiple languages like C#, Javascript and Typescript.

Very customizable and lightweight installation requirements.

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.

SourceControl integration

Collaboration

Installing Frameworks

Speed

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

Visual studio has a lot of features included that you would expect to need external extensions for, like code snippets for quick completion of common programming syntax like constructors and properties (and many many more).

Visual Studio also has a vibrant community developing extensions for it that extend it well beyond its base functionality.

The debugging interface and your ability to interact with your code during debugged execution are fantastically helpful. I love being able to step back to a previous execution point and change data.

The ability to quickly and easily compile desktop apps.

System performance of Visual Studio leaves some room to be desired. I understand that it has a lot going on, but the system resource usage, load times and sometimes general responsiveness of VS leaves room to be desired.

Code management

Debugging

Version control integration

Extensibility

Unit testing

Handling merge conflicts can be tricky and confusing, though it's hard to tell if this is a failing of Visual Studio or TFS.

Best code prompts (intellosense) of any IDE

Easy to learn and use, intuitive

Built in dependency management that works without a hassle

The size is very large and it takes a long time to install

It is expensive for pro, although the community edition is free

Sometimes the project format changes and this forces multiple solution files or everyone in the team to upgrade

Code suggestion and completion: the IntelliSense feature of the IDE helps a lot in cutting typing time and access to complex APIs

Performance tools and analytics that helps chase issues

Awesome integration with Microsoft cloud Services

Performance of the IDE itself. There are some areas it could do with performance kicks

Visual Studio is, of course, good at developing C# applications. With its smart tools to help debug, catch errors, and enforce standards it can be a good tool to use in order to develop applications quickly

Visual Studio integrates well with Microsoft related products. If your technology stack is mostly created by Microsoft, this is a good fit

When creating applications, there are different templates that are useful for starting a project, particularly their Website MVC model which was helpful for students first learning about Visual Studio and C#

We've had trouble with the Microsoft team services with Git on multiple occasions. Sometimes logging in to a Microsoft account using their Visual Studio IDE can be a problem. And to fix the issue is not intuitive sometimes.

Developing a project such as SQL Server Database Project or SQL Server Analysis Services can be weird sometimes. Files can change without you noticing and can be difficult to fix.

Especially for the REST projects, the .edmx files can be hard to use. Refreshing the DB to reflect whats in the DB is very inconsistent. I rarely use this feature and often just delete tables in the DB then just re-add them.

Workarounds just exist throughout much of Visual Studio sometimes, but there are enough resources out there to figure out what's wrong.