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The Best IDE
September 24, 2018

The Best IDE

Gordon Lo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Visual Studio IDE

The Visual Studio IDE really started with a couple developers at Dynacare when a decision was made to start modernizing our enterprise applications. It's used by over a dozen developers today including back-end, front-end web, report designers, and our IT operations team to develop tools and applications for the business.
  • Integration into git and in particular VSTS (now named Azure DevOps) is amazing. The experience is seamless and works very well.
  • Backward compatibility is better than ever, so there's less risk of breaking applications as you upgrade from different versions of Visual Studio.
  • The development experience in Visual Studio is second-to-none. This really is the gold standard for IDEs with tight integration into the Microsoft stack, built-in unit testing tools, debugging and diagnostics capabilities, ... the list goes on. Everything is at the developer's finger-tips.
  • Anyone who has the displeasure of working with SSRS or SSIS knows... Visual Studio is pretty bad for building SSIS flows and building SSRS reports. Those two features feel half-baked, and there are usually compile-time errors between VS2013 and newer versions of VS depending on your SSIS package.
  • Updates occur regularly and often eat up disk space and/or cause instability. You may want to avoid being on the latest and greatest release of VS just because it can cause all sorts of head-aches. Over time, you'll probably notice decreased disk space - the VS updates usually eat disk and never give any of it back.
  • VS is very heavy - though load-times have gotten better since 2008, it does still require a lot of resources to do your development. If you're still using a traditional hard disk vs a SSD you may find build and launch times particularly slow.
  • Living in the Microsoft eco-system, the VS IDE really isn't a choice, so much as a requirement for developing applications. The speed at which developers become acclimatized to the tool is a sentiment to the ease of use for the IDE and adherence to good practice. This enables us to onboard new developers and get them up and running in a short period of time vs having to install and configure other IDEs.
  • The VS IDE does include the core set of tools required for development - that alone makes life easier and reduces the need to hunt for 3rd party development add-ons. Though some are nice to have, it isn't required to get going with development. Meaning the IDE is really all you need. Fewer tools to purchase, lower running costs for development.
I've used evaluated IBM Rational Developer for i, IBM Rational Application Developer, Android Studio, Eclipse for Java, and a few others. Visual Studio is the best. Other tools require longer setup times, don't always have all the tools integrated into the IDE or require additional 3rd party tools to complete the experience. VS shines at being basically install and go type of software. That's rare in the industry and is remarkable how well it works. A second place would be the Android Studio which has improved dramatically in the past few years. Visual Studio, coupled with supporting services like Azure DevOps (or whatever source control you use), nuget.org, integration of unit testing, various project types, etc makes the other IDEs feel cumbersome and dated.
If you live in the Microsoft stack, the Visual Studio IDE is the only IDE you need. The integration into Azure DevOps is amazing - again, keeping in the Microsoft ecosystem of products - which makes life as a developer that much better. I don't really see VS used outside the Microsoft stack - for Java development you may still want to use Eclipse, and mobile dev for Android you'll have better tools provided by google based on Eclipse.

Using Visual Studio IDE

15 - All users are part of the software development team - though they do support different business functions including laboratory, insurance, home care, and mobile care lines of business.
2 - There really isn't much to the support of VS. I manage the license allocation while our sys admins manage actual provisioning via the microsoft license management portals - the developers are able to install and customize the IDE to their hearts content.
  • We have home-grown enterprise applications that require enhancements/updates. They are built in the microsoft stack and so require developers to use Visual Studio. These include both web apps, windows services, web services, etc.
  • Visual Studio is used to build SSRS reports for our operations teams.
  • The Visual Studio IDE continues to evolve with Microsoft's service offerings. We've been developing cloud native applications using VS IDE. Serverless functions leveraging Azure SQL can all be developed and tested with the VS IDE.
VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.