Visual Studio - IDE. Prominent with Good Reason
March 21, 2018
Visual Studio - IDE. Prominent with Good Reason
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction with Visual Studio IDE
We are using Visual Studio as our main IDE because we have integrations with Azure, Visual Studio Team Services (a service that uses Git for collaboration), Odata, etc. Since we primarily use these tools, Visual Studio makes the most sense for our development of an application. In terms of our stack, we primarily use Visual Studio for the Web Service side. The main problem it solves is that it integrates well with our other systems out of the box so there are fewer headaches when setting up and maintaining environments.
- 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.
- Quicker integration with Microsoft Services
- Easy to learn due to the accessibility of resources and prominence in the software development world.
- Microsoft Suite comes at a high cost
- Easy to collaborate with your team with easy-to-use Git integration
- Eclipse and Visual Studio Code
There are other free open-source project alternatives that you could use instead of Visual Studio. If you are using non-Microsoft services such as AWS, you should consider using other programming languages that don't cost as much due to licensing.