Visual Studio still offers a rich IDE experience and keeps in healthy competition with my preferred IDE
March 02, 2020

Visual Studio still offers a rich IDE experience and keeps in healthy competition with my preferred IDE

Anthony Aziz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Visual Studio IDE

I have used Visual Studio for all C#, ASP.NET, and even Classic ASP development over the past 10 years. Nowadays our team mostly uses Rider IDE but Visual Studio still remains installed for a few special use cases, where we want first-party IDE support.
  • Provides a smooth, efficient IDE for developing .NET applications.
  • Debugging tools are better than any other IDE I've used in the past.
  • Has a great selection of extensions, e.g Resharper and OzCode.
  • Visual Studio can be clunky and slow at times, much longer loading and building than Rider.
  • Having the manually save after becoming used to auto-saving and automatic local history is an annoyance and constant fear.
  • Slowness legitimately impacted performance and ultimately led us to purchase another product.
  • Being .NET developers however we still keep it installed for those corner cases, so it still has a use.
Visual Studio was my preferred IDE before Rider became mature enough to replace it. Rider's performance, source control tools, and built-in refactoring make VS limited to specific use cases where Rider doesn't support.

Visual Studio still offers a rich IDE experience over other IDEs or code editors, such as refactoring, organization, source control, etc.
I have not had to use any support for VS.

Do you think Microsoft Visual Studio delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft Visual Studio's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft Visual Studio live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft Visual Studio go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft Visual Studio again?

No

I would still recommend Visual Studio to anyone looking to do anything serious with .NET as an IDE if they have access to it, but for the most part, JetBrains Rider wins my recommendation. I think that if you're working on Windows-specific applications or some specific scenarios that VS supports, you have a use for it.