C# tooling is very sub-par compared to what exists in the Java world, and I'm not just talking about build tooling (package management is a tough problem and Maven/Gradle are not perfect but NuGet is just atrocious) but debugging/deployment tooling as well. It's an artifact of how C# was a closed-source product for so long, the first-party tooling is pretty good for basic stuff but try deploying it outside a Windows environment and the edges become viciously sharp. Mono is a joke compared to OpenJDK, and I can happily deploy my application on any of a half dozen web servers that provide some superset of capabilities of the official server.

I understand that's changing of course, now that Microsoft has open-sourced the core of the language and started pushing to get support onto Linux and other platforms, but they are still making up an almost 2-decade deficit here.

But yeah, Visual Studio beats the pants off Netbeans and Eclipse, while functional, is very clearly what happens when you let an engineer design a UI, everything is possible and nothing is easy.

No, they are correct, the tooling is bad. Tooling in the sense of setting up a build for a large and complex project, that can resolve dependencies quickly and correctly, where the build is very fast and deterministic, where incremental builds always work correctly, where building multiple configurations is easy and reliable, and so on.

The development tooling is great for small projects and breaks down a little as project size grows, while the automation and deployment tooling is middling-to-bad in my experience. The parent post is right about NuGet and MSBuild both being pretty ponderous compared to the myriad of package management and build solutions for various frameworks in the OSS world, and deployment for wider-scale systems is falling behind the K8s/containerized state of the art as well.

"Comprehensive" is not always a positive trait of an IDE. I much prefer Rider over Visual Studio.

NuGet does have some rough edges, and compile time for even my small .NET Core projects tends to be on the order of seconds, which is surprising for a mature compiler and stripped-down framework.

I find VS to be a bloated legacy relic that's particularly limited without ReSharper, although I much prefer the leaner and more advanced Rider which is a fraction of the size with more intelligent features that VS has been copying (from R#/Rider) for several years. Rider is leaner, faster, smarter, more extensible with higher quality plugins offering better support for developing modern Web Apps.

IMO the investment in VS Code basically signals VS has become too bloated and complex to innovate on so they're better off creating a new IDE from scratch with better plugin extensibility and ecosystem that's innovating and delivering features significantly faster than VS which comparatively looks like it's stalled.

Visual Studio has always been 1st class for developing whatever Microsoft is currently pushing, and the debugger is by far the best I've used.

Anything outside of that is average, if anything.

It all depends on your perspective. Java has a very long history of enterprise-grade tooling, including IDEs. Way back when VS still didn't have all the basic refactorings for C#, IDEA had structural search (i.e. pattern matching search that understands language constructs, types etc). VS has improved, but so did the Java IDEs.

So when you look at VS from the perspective of someone who's used to typical Unix or JS tooling, it's comprehensive. If you look it from the perspective of an old time Java developer, it's lagging behind.

Did you even read past the first line of my response? <rollseyes>