Visual Studio IDE is a mandatory platform that I'm happy to use
June 30, 2019
Visual Studio IDE is a mandatory platform that I'm happy to use
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Enterprise
Overall Satisfaction with Visual Studio IDE
Visual Studio IDE is used across our entire technical team, as it's the primary way we develop our application in C#. When working with Microsoft, it's effectively a requirement to use this IDE to gain access to the various Microsoft compilers, etc. that support the development of the platform. We use it for various items, such as code linting, building and running the projects, debugging, unit test execution, project organization, and things of that sort.
- Very complete feature set for what it can do.
- The interface is easy to understand and can be made into dark mode OR light mode.
- The output is nicely formatted, and the code highlighting/linting is excellent.
- It can be a bit of a heavy program, especially if you need to open multiple solutions.
- There's no support for opening multiple solutions in one 'program,' which is a bummer.
- Sometimes the more advanced functionality/hotkeys can be hard to remember, so some way to move through the program in a more intuitive way would be nice.
- Positive: It enables our developers to all work in a common environment that is easy to collaborate in.
- Positive: It standardizes the building and compiling of our projects so that we don't have to get that working on a one-on-one basis.
- Negative: It can be expensive, as the licensing is per-developer, so as your tech team grows, so does your licensing cost.
Compared to a lot of these options (which are free except WebStorm), Visual Studio definitely leads the pack as far as its completeness of feature set. There are deep integrations with the Microsoft ecosystem with Visual Studio that the others can't really compete with, as Visual Studio has the full support of the Microsoft team full time to keep bringing in new features, bug fixes, etc. Things like NetBeans, Eclipse, while they do have a team, also rely heavily on the open source community in order to create a good experience. They also try to be a bit more of a 'one shoe fits all' type IDE, which inherently is going to be less feature-rich. Webstorm is the one exception, and it's the closest to Visual Studio as far as support and feature set, so the main difference is that Webstorm focuses a lot more on Javascript/Typescript, and not the C# stack, so comparing the two isn't necessarily fair.