Rider offers a smoother and more productive alterative to Visual Studio.
June 18, 2019

Rider offers a smoother and more productive alterative to Visual Studio.

Anthony Aziz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with JetBrains Rider

All five of our engineers have adopted Rider as our primary IDE for .NET development, which is our main project. We develop an online, web-based service with components in .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Xamarin. Rider has been a successful alternative to Visual Studio to improve developer experience and productivity.
  • Provides a smooth, efficient IDE for developing .NET applications. Performance has been much better than Visual Studio in my experience.
  • Integrated refactoring tools are really comprehensive and useful.
  • Integrates with other JetBrains products such as TeamCity, Upsource, dotTrace, etc.
  • The debugger tools are still lacking compared to Visual Studio, especially when you consider plugins such as OzCode.
  • I still keep Visual Studio installed. Sometimes the project won't build correctly, or exhibit strange behaviour. Usually clean, restart, and rebuild addresses actual issues, but I always double check with Visual Studio in such cases.
  • Versioning can be a bit of a nightmare. There is an official updater, but they tend to leave old versions hanging around and I have found myself accidentally using a previously installed version without intending to.
  • Development experience led to faster development times due to better performance, well worth the licence cost.
Rider (and the entire IntelliJ suite) has been my preferred IDE for years. Visual Studio is wonderful as well, but Rider just keeps ahead in the important features. More importantly, both IDEs provide healthy competition and I only see this getting better.

Compared to other popular IDEs that aren't .NET specific (such as Eclipse), I don't see any reason to use them unless you need specific features or plugins that the JetBrains family doesn't support.
Rider can pretty much be a drop-in replacement for Visual Studio in most scenarios. The development experience is wonderful, and I have rarely had problems with building, running tests, and debugging applications. You might need to keep around Visual Studio to publish or build installers, but the Rider team is constantly adding feature parity and new features, so the future looks even stronger.

Using JetBrains Rider

5 - All of our developers use Rider for .NET development. We have developers working on both Windows and Mac systems, working on ASP.Net Core projects, IIS ASP.NET MVC projects, console applications, Xamarin projects, etc.
We don't have anyone that owns supporting Rider, nor do I think that is necessary.
  • Develop .NET applications and systems
  • Track code reviews using Upsource Integration
Due to the performance and productivity benefits we get with Rider, we will continue to use it for the foreseeable future.