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Visual Studio IDE - My IDE of Choice
February 01, 2019

Visual Studio IDE - My IDE of Choice

Aaron Pace | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Community

Overall Satisfaction with Visual Studio IDE

We're a small development shop. Currently, we use only two development solutions: the Visual Studio IDE and Visual Studio Code. We use Visual Studio (the IDE) for our major projects because it is really good at keeping track of the various aspects of a large solution. We use Visual Studio Code for one-off things that don't require all the capabilities of the larger IDE. The Visual Studio IDE is used by all our developers on current projects.
  • Ability to add plug-ins that support non-Microsoft solutions (such as PHP and Python).
  • Power to organize and support even large enterprise applications.
  • Well-structured. The built-in organization of VS makes it easy to keep track of complex projects.
  • Intuitive. The controls in VS are easy to find and use.
  • It's very large. Microsoft thought of just about everything with VS and they included it all out of the box. The installation files are massive and take hours to download on a slow connection.
  • Resource hungry. VS uses a lot of system resources.
  • Complex. One of its strengths can also be viewed as a weakness. As you learn the platform, it can be overwhelming trying to figure out everything that's included.
  • Since we're currently using the community edition, there was no expense to implement Visual Studio which meant an instant ROI.
  • Because of the capabilities Visual Studio has to track large projects we've benefited from improved productivity using this IDE. We don't have to use multiple tools to build out a project.
  • I don't consider it a negative, but to use a tool like Visual Studio you have to invest the money in buying hardware that's fast enough to run the IDE. That probably goes without saying.
While it has been a long time, I've used NetBeans in the past. I've also NOT used an IDE for development. Where Visual Studio IDE really shines is in its capabilities in supporting all Microsoft products, including the Azure platform. I don't expect that kind of support from NetBeans, but a strength of Visual Studio is also that I can do with it what I can do with NetBeans. Visual Studio supports plug-ins and extensions for many programming languages which means it is a great tool even for non-Microsoft development teams.
I started my coding experience without using a formal IDE - it was really just a text editor. NetBeans was my first formal IDE experience. It was hard for me to use - probably because I was a total novice. As I've grown up using various IDEs, Visual Studio has become my IDE of choice because it is so well-suited to the projects I've worked on. I've been a semi-professional Microsoft stack developer for the last 5 years so using Microsoft tools has just made sense. For the most part, they've had my needs in mind as new features of Visual Studio have become available. It has been my preferred tool for the last two years.