Overall Satisfaction with Visual Studio IDE
Visual Studio to the goto IDE for every developer at LiveTiles. We use it to build our client-side components in Typescript & React, plus back-end components in C#. Need to open up a database and make some queries? Visual Studio. Need to configure some Azure resources? Visual Studio. Need to manage backlog items and check-ins in source control? That's right - Visual Studio.
- Code editing with best-of-class auto-complete, refactoring, and shortcuts
- Managing source control branches, work items, etc, fully integrated with Azure DevOps
- SQL Management and Cloud resource management
- While stability in recent years is so much better, Visual Studio still crashes from time-to-time
- Better feature parity between C# and Typescript
- Since each team at Microsoft builds their own tooling, there are feature sets that you think would work similarly (EG, web apps vs Azure Functions), but they work completely differently.
- We spent about the first year on Visual Studio Community, which is completely free for small companies, and it offered a better Developer Experience than any other IDE on the market
- Integration with Azure DevOps has made adoption of good Change Management practices very simple for developers
- As a company with a core product intended to run on SharePoint, it provides the vital and exclusive tool for delivering products worth millions
I used Eclipse and NetBeans when working as a Java developer. Both IDEs are inferior developer experiences with slower performance and downright chaotic user-interfaces. If the nature of the project would allow adoption of Visual Studio over these alternatives, I would highly recommend Visual Studio. While not an option on the products list, I also used XCode for building native iOS apps for iPhone and iPad. XCode is a lot simpler to use, but also has a lot fewer features. Visual Studio is not usually a valid alternative to XCode, so in this case, it's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison.