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Visual Studio still the Best IDE for Windows for more than Two Decades and Still Going Strong
June 07, 2019

Visual Studio still the Best IDE for Windows for more than Two Decades and Still Going Strong

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Professional

Overall Satisfaction with Visual Studio IDE

We use Visual Studio Pro for all Windows-oriented software development including but not limited to web front end, report generation, database development, ETL, and information processing code. Because it integrates well with our Github Enterprise source control system, VS gives our developers a solid platform for team-oriented software development, deployment and life-cycle management.
  • Since Microsoft offers a free Community Edition of the IDE many of our new developers have used it at home or school and are very familiar with the user interface, requiring little training to move up to the paid, enterprise-friendly editions we use.
  • The online community support for Visual Studio is outstanding, as solid or better than any other commercial or open-source project software.
  • Microsoft continuously keeps the product up to date and has maintained a history of doing so. They use it internally for their own development so there is little chance it will ever fall out of favor and become unsupported.
  • The user interface can be a bit daunting to new people but the myriad of training videos and examples more than makes up for this weakness.
  • Being a developer tool that's always being enhanced with new features, sometimes it can crash--save frequently just to be sure--you should be doing this anyway.
  • Using the integration between Visual Studio and our source control service, the cost of re-work and losing code is drastically reduced.
  • Paid versions of Visual Studio enable developers to be so much more productive than hacked-together open source solutions that it's hard to imagine developing in Windows without it.
  • When combined with support subscriptions and the vast array of free online help options available, Visual Studio saves our developers time by keeping them coding and testing, not wasting their time trying to guess their way out of problems or spend endless hours online hoping to find answers.
I work mostly in C++ so CLion from Jetbrains is a nice alternative...but it just doesn't stack up to Visual Studio. My paid version of VS meets all of my development needs and has done so for more than two decades so I see no reason to look any further. That said, I have looked around a lot and found CLion was the only non-VS IDE that I liked, but it's not enough to counter the value Microsoft provides.
Visual Studio is definitely the IDE of choice when it comes to the Windows platform. There are competitive products available but between the free Community Edition's zero cost to try and adopt to the feature set of the paid editions, plus the fact that it's the tool Microsoft uses to develop its own software solutions, there is no reason not to use it. That's hard to say about many products or services out there.