Visual Studio 2015 - worth the upgrade from prior versions
Updated April 26, 2017
Visual Studio 2015 - worth the upgrade from prior versions
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction with Visual Studio IDE
Our development team recently upgraded to Visual Studio 2015, and were previously using Visual Studio 2013. The applications we develop allow a physician to register for certification exams and continuing education modules, manage their profile, receive communications from our organization and aid our scoring process to name a few key projects. We use a variety of technologies including ASP.Net MVC, web API and web services, message queuing, ORMs, and Angular to create these platforms which are all developed with Visual Studio.
- Visual Studio 2015 has improved support for TypeScript, which has smoothed our teams transitioning to Angular 2. Intellisense and keyword recognition were not well supported in the prior releases.
- The latest version of Visual Studio incorporates a new "My Work" tab for Team Explorer which allows developers to efficiently track work items assigned to them, as well as request, accept, decline, and perform code reviews. This additional has allowed my team to improve our in-house code review process during our day to day sprint work.
- Visual Studio does an excellent job of incorporating external tools that can be added on to provide additonal support and allows a developer to create custom toolbar buttons. We do just this we tools that we use for compiling TypeScript for Angular 2.0 projects, as well as tools to help us enforce coding standards, and unit test code coverage.
- Visual Studio offers great debugging functionality for unit testing, which has allow our teams to improve our application performance and trace errors much more quickly.
- The native support for Jasime in Visual Studio 2015, while developing unit tests for Angular 2.0, could be improved. I have found myself using an alternative version, Visual Studio Code, to perform this task as the native support is much better.
- I find that the auto-formatting of HTML files leaves a bit to be desired. Too many developers are careless with indentation, and when making changes to files that have been maintained by a developer whose indentation varies or has been careless, the auto-formatting does not do a great job of adjusting the indentation making it confusing and time intensive to make the adjustments manually.
- Visual Studio could use better organized menus, allowing me to find all windows, such as solution explorer, team explorer, and debug windows, in the same menu so that I do not need to hunt them down. I'd prefer spending more time on the code, and less time remembering which menu hold the options for each window and toolbar.
- Speed is the most obvious benefit from Visual Studio. Developer are able to get a project going quickly, and provide results to stakeholders quickly.
- We use SCRUM at our office and Visual Studio has great support for SCRUM, making it easy for developers to present their progress during daily Stand-up meetings with the team. Checked in code can be linked to tasks directly from the Sprint, and code reviews may be performed and tracked from Visual Studio.
- The learning curve associated with Visual Studio is minimal for new developers, so bringing a young developer up to speed on specific application requirements and features will not be hindered by a complex IDE.
Visual Studio supports many languages aside from the Microsoft .Net suite, including client-side scripting, unit test frameworks, T-SQL, PL\SQL, as we as offering modeling tools for databases. I honestly have not looked for alternatives simply because of the quantity of features that Visual Studio offers, many of which I take advantage of on a routine basis. I have used others sparingly, but have not favored any of them over Visual Studio.