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Visual Studio: It's neither visual nor a studio.
December 13, 2017

Visual Studio: It's neither visual nor a studio.

Denny Caldwell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Visual Studio IDE

Visual Studio is the primary IDE utilized in our organization and is utilized throughout our organization. We use Visual Studio for developing software both for internal use and for software which we produce for our customers. Our company develops web-based applications using Visual Studio for both internal and external use, as well as some Windows-based applications using Visual Studio for internal use.
  • Visual Studio's tight integration with the TFS code repository and issue tracker is second to none.
  • There are numerous plugins available for Visual Studio - both produced by Microsoft and by third-parties. This allows for significant customization of your implementation to meet your specific needs and desires.
  • In my opinion, Visual Studio simplifies managing builds and dependencies compared to other IDEs such as Eclipse.
  • Visual Studio supports many advanced "design-time" features such as Intellisense, design-time error and warning highlighting for many errors, and color coding of source files.
  • Over the years Visual Studio has become bloated. It often takes a long time to load and can be a resource hog. At times it even lags while you type.
  • Visual Studio has decent support for repositories other than TFS such as Git, but leaves some room for improvement.
  • The IDE tries a little too hard to be an all-in-one tool, leaving the UI rather messy. There are just too many options hidden within the numerous menus that often take up the entire height of the screen.
  • We receive Visual Studio as part of our MSDN subscription with Microsoft (which we need for other business reasons as well), so the price is right.
  • All of the software engineers in our entire organization using one flavor of Visual Studio or another. This has helped us to all "speak the same language" when it comes to our IDE. This has a positive impact on our engineering teams, but most of all simplifies things from a support perspective.
  • The computer hardware required for getting Visual Studio to function even somewhat smoothly when developing a large, enterprise-level application are rather exhaustive. As such, all of our engineers require pretty expensive computers to complete their work.
I have rather limited experience with Eclipse and and VS Code. I would choose Visual Studio any day over Eclipse as Visual Studio is comparably more straight-forward and easier to use. Visual Studio is not straight-forward or easy to use by any measure, but it is easier than Eclipse.

VS Code on the other hand seems to be Microsoft's answer to Visual Studio becoming too bloated, and has seen substantial support from the developer community with a multitude of third-party, often open source, plugins.
When it comes to developing a C# application, Visual Studio is the full-featured option. But if you don't require some feature there-in, Visual Studio Code (a separate offering from Microsoft with a similar name) is the way to go. Do your research and weigh your options before making the decision that is right for your organization or department.