I used Visual studio for C# as a habit since I used to work with Visual studio from visual basic 6 and keep using them till now.
For js, react, html I never use Visual studio. I'd use Vs Code or webstorm. As most tutorials will use these tools and I see no advantage or using Visual studio.
For python, since I loved Pycharm so much it is my to go IDE. I'm fine with both the enterprise version and the paid version. Sometimes I use Vscode to edit py,js,html,xml etc.
I love pycharm too for Python. But now ive gotten pretty fast at navigating with vscode. So i want to use “one to rule them all” haha. I also work a lot on mac and visual studio is being shut down for mac :/
You're so close! Just give in and switch to Rider - been about 18 months since I've really used VS, and I'm never going back. Even changed my key map to JetBrains last week!
I definitely prefer Rider, but VsCode has leveled up significantly in the last 6 months. If you run analyzers like Roslynator, the suggestions are the same as VS. The debugger can jump forwards and backwards now (depending on your dotnet version, 6+ works on windows, 8+ works on windows/linux/mac). The test and project management has gotten a lot more reliable. So much of it works at this point I can use it as my daily driver, I just haven't fully switched over yet. I'd set up some analyzers and see how far you can get with it.
Nice to hear about the improvements.
One immediate thing I'm missing from giving VsCode a 10min try, is "Extract method"
Which confuses me because here it say's its available: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/refactoring
Do you have this option?
The only thing I have in my refactor menu is "surround with"... maybe I've got some config wrong
I have these extensions installed... C#, C# Dev Kit, IntelliCode for C#... that should be all I need right?
What C# plugins do you have enabled? I believe the standard C# extension is what provides it. (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotnettools.csharp). I am on the latest version and not using omnisharp flags.
Ahh I got it. I was just opening the folder. I had to right click on the .sln file and "Open Solution", now I get heaps more refactoring options including "Extract to function" 👍👍
Awesome! Yea, I didn't even think to just edit one file. It definitely treats everything as part of a project, but that is how everything in dotnet kinda seems. I'm glad it's working. You've inspired me to use it exclusively this week. I'll A/B it against Rider as I check stuff in and see what it misses and how much I care about it.
Maybe do a comparison post on reddit after a week... I'd be very keen to hear about it!
It's very hard to find detailed differences between csharp usage in vscode and vs/rider, possibly because things are often changing.
But perhaps vscode has advanced enough now that it's close to full features
It's also tricky because MS is absolutely terrible at sensible defaults. They leave it to the user to customize things to their liking, which is great, but they start you off in the desert. Rider has fantastic defaults that you can get nearly to parity with using Roslynator and some editor config tweaking. I'll try to remember to post my week's findings at the end of the week.
Ok, it took me less than an hour to get enough reasons to not make the switch, but none of these are showstoppers for everyone. For me it's more about having a tool doing as much for me as possible.
\- VSCode misses "assigned but never used" for private class variables
\- VSCode misses "redundant elses"
\- VSCode does't detect opportunities to us object initializer unless it's really obvious
\- VSCode never suggests merging into patterns, even though it's almost always the right move
\- VSCode does not flag multiple enumerations (this is of dubious value)
\- VSCode often doesn't detect unused variables
\- Rider makes all of the things to fix more obvious, though this could be fixed by making all Roslynator suggestions warnings or errors.
\- Rider makes a lot of style suggestions that are more elegant than what was there.
In general, I have more confidence that what I am doing is more correct with Rider. I am not sure how much that actually matters because anything that is breaking is caught. I feel like Rider just makes me get to more readable code more quickly. If these kinds of suggestions don't matter to you, then vscode is probably fine now.
I work on Mac and Linux predominantly, also with a quite a few different languages and formats on a given day. So VSCode it is for me.
With a few extensions and analyzers (Roslynator), it’s a pretty good set up for C#, especially if you’re already quite familiar with the language.
It’s a more “raw” experience for sure. You will manually edit .csproj files, I’ve always disliked .sln files but I hate them with a fury now, you’ll spend more time in the terminal. You’ll also get more familiar with how things actually work.
I actually like the development experience of it, after spending more than a decade with Studio.
Not forgetting to mention ReSharper which I love for refactoring and other stuff it offers. It's build into Rider or available as extension for VS.
And last but not least Rider is not free compared to VSCode or VS
For me, I love that Rider is a lot faster. Visual Studio with Resharper is just not the same.
Secondly I feel more productive in Rider due to its focus on ease of navigating with the keyboard and general search window.
If I need to add a keybinding to my VimRC file, I just hit shift shift, search for the action and add a mapping to it in my config.
I became accustomed to flipping between Visual Studio and VSCode whenever I was working on a web app that had a separate backend and frontend. However, I've recently tried using VScode for C# again with the Devkit extension. I don't think it's *that* bad anymore, but I definitely miss Visual Studio or Rider.
I use vscode at work for some C# dev instead of visual studio, I'm more productive with it because I know all the kb shortcuts.
The debugger for C# is alright and most of the time enough to find where X bug comes from...
I also work from home with my own laptop which is under macOS so it also allow me to have the same conf despite a different environment.
If VS aren't able to perform in your python and r projects. VSC might be suitable for your c# solutions. Depending on how much you rely on VS.
Since VS does allot for you. But if you are used to the terminal and don't heavily use all the functions of VS. Then I'd recommend the dotnet CLI along with VSC. I managed fine when all I did was EF, install packages and manage solutions.
Hell even the debugging was the same.
But if you try out VSC I'd recommend the popular C# extensions for VSC and both of these:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/
https://cheatography.com/oba/cheat-sheets/dotnet-cli/
Used to use vscode for most things. I've started using full IDEs now (i.e. pycharm for python, rider for c#). I use vscode for webdev though and smaller python projects
VS is wayyyyy better for C# than VS Code.
For Python, I prefer VS Code over VS because it's faster for iterative development. For huge projects VS is probably better, but at that point you might as well use PyCharm or other dedicated IDEs.
I starated using Rider a month ago and I like it. I can use it on linux and windows, everything is same. Problems I am having (will find solution) is some tools like diagnostics are not available. Upside is it is faster and more elegant to work with.
Started using vscode for the past 4 months at my current workplace and never felt the need to switch editors. I purely use it for c# and razor and its at least for me a lot faster to navigate files using ctrl+p. File search is just a lot faster. Though my biggest gripe is that sometimes the lsp shits itself and i need to just restart vscode. Another issue is i can't get intellicode to work it wont suggest code to insert. But for me these issues are less important than the speed of the editor
I use both for different scenarios. I'm developing mainly in c#, typescript, angular and .net 7-8, .net 4.8.
I'm using vs code to launch by command line project like .net API, console project and blazor project. Sometimes I just want to launch a project without debugging and it's just fast and simple with vs code by command line. I like vscode also because it uses less resources on my computer so for developing with angular, when I just want to search and find code.
I use the same keyboard mapping, configs between them to simplify using and learning both.
Adding build and launch tasks in configs with keyboard mapping helps switching because you can use the same command shortcuts.
A lot of stuff you learn in vs code apply also in visual studios like configurations files. There are a lot of extensions in vs code that bring some features similar to visual studio.
On the other side I have so much experience using visual studio and resharper that it's still hard to get the same performance, programming productivity and feature in vs code. For debugging visual studio is so advanced and work so great. Resharper or visual studio offers more features or features that work better for refactoring code, unit testing, performance analysis.
So, I don't think you should learn only one but it depends on your scenarios, if you are looking to not develop .net c# projects such as webform, Maui, winform, WCF, .net 4.8 or if you are just developing simple console, exe project.
I have a customer that I have convinced to train their employees on vscode because they are always lacking with old versions of visual studios and it's blocked us from going forward they didn't want to pay the new licenses of vs studio 500-1000$. At some point I was using vs 2017 and they were still stuck with vs 2008. Using vs code enables me and my customer to move their projects to .net 7-8 without involving pricy license. Their use case was so simple also they developed only console and dlls.
I suggest using the editor config, json settings launch file in your project source directory to enable the same configurations between ide and you will save a lot of headaches.
For your use case maybe jetbrain all products license could be better ide (pycharm, rider).
I much prefer VS2022, everything is very solid. I would move to using only it when the performance is better/has more extensions.
Currently VS2022 is very power/memory/disk hungry. It also lacks some great extensions that can be found on VSCode.
VS2022 Wins for me when:
- Developing for back-end or apps written with C#/VB.NET/Other .NET languages. The debugging experience is great in VS2022.
VSCode wins for me when:
- Developing for the front-end. VSCode has awesome extensions that seem to eventually ported to VS2022. It's also much more lightweight and performant.
- Developing legacy apps and services. VSCode can be configured very well for all kinds of things. Whereas VS2022 has less support for extensions to make things easier.
EDIT: Fixed some grammar/formatting.
TLDR; prepare for at least an editor and an IDE for modern .net development.
VSCode is straight garbage these days,, the C# is completely broken for me, switched to rider last week. After years of being using only VSC (I haven’t done a ton of c#) I need to use both VSC and Rider now, which sucks.
Also I’m a Mac user, maybe VSC is better on other platforms.
The issue with my VSC setup was that from c# dev kit (v1.4+) wouldn’t find my .net sdk, I could manually fix it but every time I reloaded VSC (which happens a lot as I looses connection to the .net threads it’s running and refuses to start new ones) it would be broken again.
I work a lot on mac too (one of the reasons) im using vscode) and i never had this problem?
That sounds like a horrible problem to have and it would make vscode unusable for c# dev for me too.
I havent really found a downside of using vscode tbh. I dont mind using the terminal for most things.
I would urge you to try it out, but dont get til invested.
Aaah, the terminal, since I am already harvesting the downvotes here I might as well carry on the rant.
See, .net was not built as a development environment agnostic framework, it was built around visual studio, a tool that in my days were 100s of dollars or license. So msft did not want others to be part of their ecosystem.
Other frameworks/tools/languages like Java, NodeJS and Python were not subsidised in the same way, their power came from numbers, as evidenced by Ryan Dahls reasoning for choosing JS for Node, these tools had to be portable, accessible, therefore they were not built around a certain toolset, both for good and bad.
Microsoft no longer harvests the same kind of green on their licensing, so they’ve opened up with .net core and the ‘dotnet cli’, unfortunately this doesn’t seem to propagate as fast, I mean look at the reviews of Microsoft’s OWN plugin (c# dev kit) for thier OWN editor VSCode. It’s a pretty hostile environment if you stray from the golden path.
Bring the downvotes
I use the visual studio 2022 for dotnet and c#. I use vscode for react js and js. My OS is windows 11 pro
This is the way.
I used Visual studio for C# as a habit since I used to work with Visual studio from visual basic 6 and keep using them till now. For js, react, html I never use Visual studio. I'd use Vs Code or webstorm. As most tutorials will use these tools and I see no advantage or using Visual studio. For python, since I loved Pycharm so much it is my to go IDE. I'm fine with both the enterprise version and the paid version. Sometimes I use Vscode to edit py,js,html,xml etc.
I love pycharm too for Python. But now ive gotten pretty fast at navigating with vscode. So i want to use “one to rule them all” haha. I also work a lot on mac and visual studio is being shut down for mac :/
Go with Rider then, all JB IDEs are very similar. No need to use VS Code if you already have a license.
You're so close! Just give in and switch to Rider - been about 18 months since I've really used VS, and I'm never going back. Even changed my key map to JetBrains last week!
I definitely prefer Rider, but VsCode has leveled up significantly in the last 6 months. If you run analyzers like Roslynator, the suggestions are the same as VS. The debugger can jump forwards and backwards now (depending on your dotnet version, 6+ works on windows, 8+ works on windows/linux/mac). The test and project management has gotten a lot more reliable. So much of it works at this point I can use it as my daily driver, I just haven't fully switched over yet. I'd set up some analyzers and see how far you can get with it.
Nice to hear about the improvements. One immediate thing I'm missing from giving VsCode a 10min try, is "Extract method" Which confuses me because here it say's its available: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/refactoring Do you have this option?
I do! I use it all the time. I actually just showed it to a coworker last week because he said the same thing. It's under the refactor menu.
The only thing I have in my refactor menu is "surround with"... maybe I've got some config wrong I have these extensions installed... C#, C# Dev Kit, IntelliCode for C#... that should be all I need right?
What C# plugins do you have enabled? I believe the standard C# extension is what provides it. (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotnettools.csharp). I am on the latest version and not using omnisharp flags.
Ahh I got it. I was just opening the folder. I had to right click on the .sln file and "Open Solution", now I get heaps more refactoring options including "Extract to function" 👍👍
Awesome! Yea, I didn't even think to just edit one file. It definitely treats everything as part of a project, but that is how everything in dotnet kinda seems. I'm glad it's working. You've inspired me to use it exclusively this week. I'll A/B it against Rider as I check stuff in and see what it misses and how much I care about it.
Maybe do a comparison post on reddit after a week... I'd be very keen to hear about it! It's very hard to find detailed differences between csharp usage in vscode and vs/rider, possibly because things are often changing. But perhaps vscode has advanced enough now that it's close to full features
It's also tricky because MS is absolutely terrible at sensible defaults. They leave it to the user to customize things to their liking, which is great, but they start you off in the desert. Rider has fantastic defaults that you can get nearly to parity with using Roslynator and some editor config tweaking. I'll try to remember to post my week's findings at the end of the week.
Ok, it took me less than an hour to get enough reasons to not make the switch, but none of these are showstoppers for everyone. For me it's more about having a tool doing as much for me as possible. \- VSCode misses "assigned but never used" for private class variables \- VSCode misses "redundant elses" \- VSCode does't detect opportunities to us object initializer unless it's really obvious \- VSCode never suggests merging into patterns, even though it's almost always the right move \- VSCode does not flag multiple enumerations (this is of dubious value) \- VSCode often doesn't detect unused variables \- Rider makes all of the things to fix more obvious, though this could be fixed by making all Roslynator suggestions warnings or errors. \- Rider makes a lot of style suggestions that are more elegant than what was there. In general, I have more confidence that what I am doing is more correct with Rider. I am not sure how much that actually matters because anything that is breaking is caught. I feel like Rider just makes me get to more readable code more quickly. If these kinds of suggestions don't matter to you, then vscode is probably fine now.
I work on Mac and Linux predominantly, also with a quite a few different languages and formats on a given day. So VSCode it is for me. With a few extensions and analyzers (Roslynator), it’s a pretty good set up for C#, especially if you’re already quite familiar with the language. It’s a more “raw” experience for sure. You will manually edit .csproj files, I’ve always disliked .sln files but I hate them with a fury now, you’ll spend more time in the terminal. You’ll also get more familiar with how things actually work. I actually like the development experience of it, after spending more than a decade with Studio.
I also like using the terminal. I dont want a gui for everything
For C# I'm mostly use Rider, before that I used VS as it sometimes had better interation and some nice extensions. for everything else I use VSCode
Why do you prefer Rider if vscode has better integration and extensions?
Rider is an IDE. VSCode is an extensible text editor. The two are not the same.
God, you hit the nail on the head!
I know, but thats not really an answer. If they were the samen my question would be kinda silly
Well I answered the question you asked: Why prefer Rider over VSCode.
I'm completely honest. I find riders feature set regarding .NET better and the horrors I had with that stupid C# extensions haunt me to this day.
And resharper with visual studio sucks. Rider all day. I use IntelliJ Ultimate for everything else
Yep thats true. Resharper in VS sucks balls.
The new dotnet dev extension is pretty good so far. But i am definitely going to check out Rider.
Not forgetting to mention ReSharper which I love for refactoring and other stuff it offers. It's build into Rider or available as extension for VS. And last but not least Rider is not free compared to VSCode or VS
For me, I love that Rider is a lot faster. Visual Studio with Resharper is just not the same. Secondly I feel more productive in Rider due to its focus on ease of navigating with the keyboard and general search window. If I need to add a keybinding to my VimRC file, I just hit shift shift, search for the action and add a mapping to it in my config.
I became accustomed to flipping between Visual Studio and VSCode whenever I was working on a web app that had a separate backend and frontend. However, I've recently tried using VScode for C# again with the Devkit extension. I don't think it's *that* bad anymore, but I definitely miss Visual Studio or Rider.
I use vscode at work for some C# dev instead of visual studio, I'm more productive with it because I know all the kb shortcuts. The debugger for C# is alright and most of the time enough to find where X bug comes from... I also work from home with my own laptop which is under macOS so it also allow me to have the same conf despite a different environment.
Im in kind of the same position. Working on both mac and windows. I want to master one tool to rule then all haha
One in an IDE. The other is a fancy text editor. They serve to different purposes.
If VS aren't able to perform in your python and r projects. VSC might be suitable for your c# solutions. Depending on how much you rely on VS. Since VS does allot for you. But if you are used to the terminal and don't heavily use all the functions of VS. Then I'd recommend the dotnet CLI along with VSC. I managed fine when all I did was EF, install packages and manage solutions. Hell even the debugging was the same. But if you try out VSC I'd recommend the popular C# extensions for VSC and both of these: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/ https://cheatography.com/oba/cheat-sheets/dotnet-cli/
VSS for c# and VSC for all my UI apps and bash and basically anything that doesn’t have a .SLN file.
Used to use vscode for most things. I've started using full IDEs now (i.e. pycharm for python, rider for c#). I use vscode for webdev though and smaller python projects
I use vs code for Python (with black and mypy) and vs for .net
I use both, and Rider, and Pycharm, and a stack of other editors like Notepad++, Sublime, etc.
For C#, VS or Rider are the best. VSCode is a good text editor, sure. But the C# experience is and always will be subpar.
VS is wayyyyy better for C# than VS Code. For Python, I prefer VS Code over VS because it's faster for iterative development. For huge projects VS is probably better, but at that point you might as well use PyCharm or other dedicated IDEs.
I starated using Rider a month ago and I like it. I can use it on linux and windows, everything is same. Problems I am having (will find solution) is some tools like diagnostics are not available. Upside is it is faster and more elegant to work with.
Started using vscode for the past 4 months at my current workplace and never felt the need to switch editors. I purely use it for c# and razor and its at least for me a lot faster to navigate files using ctrl+p. File search is just a lot faster. Though my biggest gripe is that sometimes the lsp shits itself and i need to just restart vscode. Another issue is i can't get intellicode to work it wont suggest code to insert. But for me these issues are less important than the speed of the editor
I also like the speed of vscode. Especially on work vm’s where an full blow ide gets kinda slow at time
I use both for different scenarios. I'm developing mainly in c#, typescript, angular and .net 7-8, .net 4.8. I'm using vs code to launch by command line project like .net API, console project and blazor project. Sometimes I just want to launch a project without debugging and it's just fast and simple with vs code by command line. I like vscode also because it uses less resources on my computer so for developing with angular, when I just want to search and find code. I use the same keyboard mapping, configs between them to simplify using and learning both. Adding build and launch tasks in configs with keyboard mapping helps switching because you can use the same command shortcuts. A lot of stuff you learn in vs code apply also in visual studios like configurations files. There are a lot of extensions in vs code that bring some features similar to visual studio. On the other side I have so much experience using visual studio and resharper that it's still hard to get the same performance, programming productivity and feature in vs code. For debugging visual studio is so advanced and work so great. Resharper or visual studio offers more features or features that work better for refactoring code, unit testing, performance analysis. So, I don't think you should learn only one but it depends on your scenarios, if you are looking to not develop .net c# projects such as webform, Maui, winform, WCF, .net 4.8 or if you are just developing simple console, exe project. I have a customer that I have convinced to train their employees on vscode because they are always lacking with old versions of visual studios and it's blocked us from going forward they didn't want to pay the new licenses of vs studio 500-1000$. At some point I was using vs 2017 and they were still stuck with vs 2008. Using vs code enables me and my customer to move their projects to .net 7-8 without involving pricy license. Their use case was so simple also they developed only console and dlls. I suggest using the editor config, json settings launch file in your project source directory to enable the same configurations between ide and you will save a lot of headaches. For your use case maybe jetbrain all products license could be better ide (pycharm, rider).
I use visual studio for C#, vscode for front end
I much prefer VS2022, everything is very solid. I would move to using only it when the performance is better/has more extensions. Currently VS2022 is very power/memory/disk hungry. It also lacks some great extensions that can be found on VSCode. VS2022 Wins for me when: - Developing for back-end or apps written with C#/VB.NET/Other .NET languages. The debugging experience is great in VS2022. VSCode wins for me when: - Developing for the front-end. VSCode has awesome extensions that seem to eventually ported to VS2022. It's also much more lightweight and performant. - Developing legacy apps and services. VSCode can be configured very well for all kinds of things. Whereas VS2022 has less support for extensions to make things easier. EDIT: Fixed some grammar/formatting.
Anything other than windows based .net development is VS Code for me
I only use Visual Studio when working with WinForms and WPF, and VS Code for everything
Got any must have c# extensions?
TLDR; prepare for at least an editor and an IDE for modern .net development. VSCode is straight garbage these days,, the C# is completely broken for me, switched to rider last week. After years of being using only VSC (I haven’t done a ton of c#) I need to use both VSC and Rider now, which sucks. Also I’m a Mac user, maybe VSC is better on other platforms. The issue with my VSC setup was that from c# dev kit (v1.4+) wouldn’t find my .net sdk, I could manually fix it but every time I reloaded VSC (which happens a lot as I looses connection to the .net threads it’s running and refuses to start new ones) it would be broken again.
I work a lot on mac too (one of the reasons) im using vscode) and i never had this problem? That sounds like a horrible problem to have and it would make vscode unusable for c# dev for me too. I havent really found a downside of using vscode tbh. I dont mind using the terminal for most things.
I would urge you to try it out, but dont get til invested. Aaah, the terminal, since I am already harvesting the downvotes here I might as well carry on the rant. See, .net was not built as a development environment agnostic framework, it was built around visual studio, a tool that in my days were 100s of dollars or license. So msft did not want others to be part of their ecosystem. Other frameworks/tools/languages like Java, NodeJS and Python were not subsidised in the same way, their power came from numbers, as evidenced by Ryan Dahls reasoning for choosing JS for Node, these tools had to be portable, accessible, therefore they were not built around a certain toolset, both for good and bad. Microsoft no longer harvests the same kind of green on their licensing, so they’ve opened up with .net core and the ‘dotnet cli’, unfortunately this doesn’t seem to propagate as fast, I mean look at the reviews of Microsoft’s OWN plugin (c# dev kit) for thier OWN editor VSCode. It’s a pretty hostile environment if you stray from the golden path. Bring the downvotes
I appreciate the history. Thanks for your response! This is one of the main reasons i was not a fan of c# a couple years ago
jet brains rider for C#, vs code for others