Hacker News Reader

Comment by aninteger | Hacker News Reader

The only problem with .NET is that the best tooling is quite expensive. Visual Studio with ReSharper or JetBrains Rider are both up there in price and MonoDevelop didn't work with .net core last I tried (2 years ago). That kind of leaves you with VSCode or a plain old editor (vim/emacs), but you really don't want to write C# code in a basic editor.

View on HN

Visual Studio Community has been free for years and lets you build anything. VS Pro and Enterprise are for bigger teams/projects with some advanced features but nothing you absolutely need.

Also what's the problem with VS Code? It's great for C#, and basically the mainstream choice for many other stacks like Go and Node already.

> Visual Studio Community has been free for years and lets you build anything.

As long as you have a small number of total VSC users (not just on a team/project, but in an org; ≤5), and are in a small, luddite, or mostly-tablets org (≤250 PCs), and don’t have much money coming through (≤$1 million revenue.)

Otherwise, its only usable for open source work, academic research, and classroom training.

At a quick googling, the basic VS Pro subscription costs $45/mo. That doesn't seem unreasonable to ask, even from a small company with $1M annual revenue.

So? The claim I was addressing was about what VS Code Community allows for free, not about the reasonability of the price of the more functionally limited, but less restrictively licensed, VS Code Pro.

There is no such thing as VS Code Pro. And Visual Studio pro/enterprise include even more functionality, not less.

You can get very far with the free VS Community and can even use it commercially.

ReSharper isn't really needed although nice to have and actually not expensive. It costs less than a decent toolbox for a handyman.

Visual Studio Community or even VSCode with Omnisharp is a very solid choice. You can easily write C# code of any complexity without any extra bells and whistles of Rider because the language itself is that good.

$500/yr is expensive for a professional developer?

Sure, in many parts of the world that's quite a bit of money. For example, it's more than 50% of what I spend on food per year.

You spend about for food 1$ a day? Where do you live? That looks cheap.

Yes, after looking up average salaries and doing a quick currency conversion, USD 500 is around 60% of a whole month's salary for an average software developer.

More like 5%. Rider is also way less expensive and IMO better than visual studio these days

They're talking averages across (some larger part of) the world. Developer salaries in the US are incredibly high.

The median salary of a software developer in Mexico for 2020 was of $1750 USD gross, so after Taxes is around $1400. $500 USD a year is crazy expensive.

It's not outrageous but it's not a trivial expensive, either.

It really depends on your 'license' with them. For me as an individual it is basically 'free'. As the community edition is basically pro in all but name. But for a corp env it is like you say it is not 'trivial expensive'. They mowed down everyone else because it was that choice for a long time. You were talking 20-30k per year per dev in the 90s for some stacks. 150-500 per year was a bargain by that metric. But now there are 5 other IDEs you can pick from that are either cheaper or free. In some cases for some langs the cheaper ones are better in all respects. In some cases they are charging anywhere from 500-9k per year depending on how you buy it. Why would I start a greenfield project with VS in that sort of env, unless I was already a 'MS shop'?

VS is nice, and one of the better IDEs but by comparison it is wildly overpriced.

VS Pro Edition is $45 a month. Hardly would call that overpriced.

It's also free if your organization makes less than $1M.

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/ is free and is pretty complete for a developer.

Free for some in some cases, depending on the number of users in your organization, the number of computers and some other things. They got rid of the actually free but less complete version (Express).

You can use community for a commercial project as a developer.

I would be hesitant to join a company that isn't even willing to pay for vs professional.

Yeah, >250 developers or >1mill revenue and _not_ being willing to pay for developer tools would be an enormous red flag :)

> Yeah, >250 developers or >1mill revenue and _not_ being willing to pay for developer tools would be an enormous red flag :)

The cutoff for Community is >5 VS Community users (not developers, either, as VS is also intended for testers, etc.), not 250, or >250 PCs in the org (not “developers” or “using VS Community”, just PCs existing in the org.)

What about 1 developer and >250 computers in a different part of the organization? The VS Community license doesn't permit this case. The discontinued VS Express did.

Interesting. I've been in and out of the .NET world over the last 15 years, and I've used Visual Studio. If my employer sprang for MSDN, I'd use Professional, but for most projects, Community worked great. I did have access to ReSharper at one point, but I didn't end up using most of the features. I've found in my own workflow, you don't need any of those things, though I'm sure some people rely on them for some personal efficiencies.

At any rate, I've never found even the free Visual Studio Community to feel like a "basic editor."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com