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Visual Studio: The Swiss Army Knife for Coding
September 25, 2018

Visual Studio: The Swiss Army Knife for Coding

Erik Ralston | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Software Version

Professional

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.
Visual Studio is well suited for: Developing console, system, mobile, or web applications using a cross-section of popular languages, with a special emphasis on C#. Managing resources in Azure or SQL Server databases. Automated, performance, and unit testing code. Code analytics (cyclomatic complexity, etc). Visual Studio is not as good at Proprietary programming languages with poor third-party support (EG, can't make a Swift app - you can make a Xamarin app on iOS). While one can use Visual Studio to write AI-integrated apps, actual data science applications wouldn't use Visual Studio (EG, not known for writing R applications).