A do it all IDE for .Net!
March 06, 2019

A do it all IDE for .Net!

Aaron Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with JetBrains Rider

I personally use Rider daily instead of Visual Studio Enterprise when I am working on our back end web API that is written in ASP.Net Core. I've also started using Rider instead of Visual Studio for our deployment and upgrade applications, and all the utilities that we write to deploy our applications into Azure and AWS. Since I prefer to use Linux as my desktop, instead of Windows, it was an easy choice to start using Rider. However, after using it, I am now hooked on it and also use it on my Windows desktop when I need to work with Windows applications.

If you've ever used Resharper in Visual Studio, you will find that the refactorings and code suggestions that it gives you are very well thought out, make your code cleaner and easier to read, and help you write better code. The only problem with this is that it can sometimes negatively affect the performance of Visual Studio, sometimes so much that you have to turn it off if it's a very large project. Rider gives you back those nice refactorings without the performance hit.

It's smooth, works well, is highly stable, and gets out of my way.
  • Helps you refactor your code into more readable and more efficient code.
  • Highly customizable UI, including color themes, shortcut key remappings, and the ability to put any Window, Toolbar, or Docked tab anywhere you want, even on second screens. Additionally, this functionality can be customized per project, not just globally for the whole machine.
  • More control over Git. Visual Studio just has the basics, but mostly all that is needed is for git repositories. It gets the job done., but Rider takes it one step further and gives you most of what you can do on the command line's simple, easy to access menu options.
  • If you use TeamCity, then you have complete and full integration into your TeamCity build server!
  • You can double tap your control key and get a quick pop up to instantly run any command. Double tap shift and you can search your entire project, filenames, AND text and filter that search!
  • If you are on Linux, it still uses Mono for a few things, such as the interactive C# window. This can be a slight issue if you are in Dotnet Core. While you can get the Dotnet script to work, there is a bug currently in the Dotnet script that doesn't allow the interactive window to work. However, you can run the Dotnet script in a terminal and get the same functionality, just not as easily.
  • Their built-in performance tools do not work on Linux.
  • Saved me a ton of time refactoring code, especially when editing web files in our project. The lack of full SAAS and JavaScript support in Visual Studio is a drain on time. Rider makes it super quick to get all the work done.
  • Their performance profilers that are built into Rider saved us hours upon hours of manpower tracking down memory and speed issues with our code. Highly recommended!
Rider is hands down smoother and way less glitchy than Visual Studio Enterprise. There are way more refactoring capabilities and spell check so that your code is readable, maintainable, and easy to follow. Since Rider is cross-platform, our developers are no longer constrained to only using Windows. We can now get a familiar development environment across Mac, Windows, or Linux!
Rider works great for all .Net development. For what I am using it for, it's way more performant and stable than full visual studio. It has support for Xamarin (Android and iOS) as well as VB.Net and F#. While I have not done any desktop development, it does support it. However, if you are using some 3rd party UI controls, you may run into some issues getting those control references into the project, and you may still have to use Visual Studio to add them.