The gold standard of IDEs.
March 05, 2019
The gold standard of IDEs.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Enterprise
Overall Satisfaction with Visual Studio IDE
We use Visual Studio Enterprise (2017 version) for our development of our desktop, server, and some web applications that we sell worldwide. Not only does our development staff use it, but our support staff and some staff in finance and sales use it for creating SQL Server Reporting Services reports that get published to our SQL Server for internal reports. The flexibility and efficiency we gain using Visual Studio over other tools has saved us time and money.
- Rock solid intellisense. For C# and VB.Net code, the intellisense provided by Visual Studio is hands down the best. If you find that you have a hard time remembering parameters of functions, or what object names were, the intellisense will rescue you and help me be an efficient developer.
- Super fast and simple to use debugger for C# and VB. Everything in the debugger is handed to you on a silver platter. When you stop on a break point, it immediately shows you the local variables, the call stack, and even your current memory usage. Setting up watch variables is super simple and you can even make breakpoints conditional so it will only stop on certain conditions.
- Hides the tedious tasks. There are quite a few things like publishing, creating click once deployments, and adding/removing settings in the project files that can be really time consuming when trying to do it by hand (such as if you don't have access to Visual Studio and you need to make changes). Visual Studio hides all the tedium from you by making nice point and click interfaces to get things done quickly.
- Web development needs some help. Make no mistake, the world has moved to the web. Some of the more annoying aspects of Visual Studio is that you do not get the proper intellisense in your HTML for javascript. If you live in the web, you will be using JavaScript and this will start to annoy you after a while. Debugging your JavaScript will need to be done in the browser. While it DOES have the functionality to debug your JavaScript in the IDE, it's painfully slow, doesn't always work right, and did I mention it's slow? We do not have slow machines, this should not be a problem.
- Xamarin "updates" seem to break your project frequently. We never could figure out why it would happen, but it seems like every update to Xamarin would break something and the project would stop building. Fixing it was a combination of deleting folder, app data folder, the project completely and re-getting it from TFS. Weird stuff that many people seem to experience, not just us.
- We've had hundreds of hours saved by the rapid development that Visual Studio provides.
- We've lost some time in the Xamarin updates. However, being cross platform, we ultimately saved tons of time not having to create separate apps for iOS and Android.
While Visual Studio Code makes up for some of its shortcomings by being an IDE for just about any language you want to develop in, having a designer for WPF or Windows Forms saves a ton of time. However, Code provides better intellisense for CSS when you use SAAS (SCSS).
We use WebStorm by JetBrains for all of our HTML/CSS/JavaScript/TypeScript work. If it's web, we use WebStorm.
Another product we've been using is Rider by JetBrains. It's also a full fledged IDE for anything .Net Framework. Our developers that prefer to use Linux as their daily desktop use Rider with .Net Core since they are all web developers, this works well. Rider has better web support than Visual Studio and if you set it up the same as WebStorm it offers the same functionality as WebStorm.