Comment by akiselev

7 years ago

It's the lack of visual studio that is often the nonstarter.

Jetbrains’ Rider IDE is now so mature that I use it as a better Visual Studio even on Windows. It also runs on Mac and Linux. Great code manipulation, navigation and refactoring tools, and great support for adjacent technologies like build and test tools for both the .net code and web front-ends.

You can get by with vscode for a lot, but not everything I think.

  • Is this purely about convenience tools in an IDE or are there some things actually locked into the Windows environment? Is .NET a lot like Xcode where it's not like you can just download the libraries + compiler + a text editor and have all you need? The latter is broadly true for every language I've really dove into so this feels like a foreign concept.

    Edit: what I could stand to gain is that I work weekly in four or five languages. Already well tooled up in Ubuntu and vscode. Nothing frustrates me more than having to keep multiple IDEs consistent. Imagine driving two cars all day that have their controls in all different places.

    • Depends on what you're doing. Some technologies are only supported on Windows (like the official UI frameworks), but most things like webdev and gamedev libraries are supported on all platforms. Giving up Visual Studio can be a hard sell, as from my experience C# + Visual Studio (+ ReSharper) is one of the most productive programming environments you can have.

      You can download the SDK from https://dotnet.microsoft.com/ and use it on any platform with your editor of choice, including JetBrains Rider, which is a cross-platform .NET IDE.

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    • The question here is - what do you gain? You're giving up arguably one of the best developer tools available for what? A slightly different desktop skin? Remapped shortcuts? Using slightly different command line commands?