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Comment by sylens | Hacker News Reader

It really is like finding enlightenment after having to figure out which third party package is best for every little thing in Node. Visual Studio is a pretty powerful IDE as well.

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Jetbrains Rider is great for .NET too, although I didn't try backend developement with it.

I’m using it for backend work day in and day out and it’s a joy.

It’s awesome. What I enjoy most is, that all the different tools feel the same, and you can use the same kind of IDE also for web developmen, JavaScript and SQL. Rider also has webstorm and datagrip bundled as a plug in, so you can also do everything in one IDE. I prefer though to use the standalone tools for that, they have just less features than rider/IntelliJ, but i would consider that a plus. Less menu items, less tool windows.

The Datagrip integration is so cool whenever I need to write raw SQL queries inside Rider

I'm a web developer that has used VS Code for years, but these past few months have been using Rider for developing a Unity project. One thing that really stands out to me about Rider is the "Refactor" (Ctrl+Shift+R) feature; extremely useful.

It allows you to just build things rapidly without worrying much about patterns/naming because once your vague ideas solidify and you realize where you went wrong, it's really easy to just Ctrl+Shift+R and make any codebase-wide adjustments instantly.

It's also great about picking up sub-optimal implementations or patterns with helpful warnings, and you just Ctrl+. to have it auto-fix for you. Using these Rider features combined with Github Copilot, I was able to pretty easily learn intermediate level C# because it's like having a mentor working along side you.

I migrated a while ago from VS + ReSharper to Rider. Mainly backend work. It’s been great.

Except botched C# style rules. Rider still insists on Java style guidelines for .net projects. And sometimes, it spawns a never ending background process that only way to get rid of is to restart the app. Otherwise, it's okay.

edit: been using Rider on Linux since a few years now

> Rider still insists on Java style guidelines for .net projects.

No, it uses Resharper as the backend.

I've been using Rider style rules for two years now exclusively in a VS based team and aside from some linebreak rules I need to tweak here and there I've seen no issues ?

But I use a .editorconfig tuned stylecop and roslynator on all projects so maybe that overrides some defaults.

Mind sharing which Java style rules are you seeing ?

Rider highlights pascal cased class methods/attributes and suggests to use camel case, for example. I haven't changed any style settings. This is Rider default. Maybe its a Linux thing.

That's just a few .editorconfig lines away from begin consistent for the whole team.

Can you install it [edit: the .Net 7/8 platform that sounds interesting, not the IDE] for free on a Linux server and get the same benefits? (This isn't advocacy, it's a literal question about something I don't know.)

Yes:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux

Also VS Code, an open source IDE with first class support for .NET languages:

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/linux

Also emacs has a pretty good csharp language server integration. I personally use the Spacemacs "dotnet" layer.

Yes, everything is completely free, open source.

Everything but the debugger sadly

I know! How crap is that? As a result, no debugging on a Raspberry PI.

It turned me right off C# outside of work. There are plenty of other languages that are better suited for hobby development.

The why is Visual Studio. The VPs running that div are a bunch of Muppets who are constantly trying their best to destroy the OSS .Net projects reputation.

The cynic in me suspects all the drama was directly related to Scott Hanselman suddenly losing interest in bloggin.

Monetizing software is so incredibly indirect. Obviously companies don't make any money on free frameworks and tooling. These days, using C#/.NET maybe/kinda/sorta increases the chances that you might deploy on Azure or use Azure services. That tiny (or not so tiny) uptick easily funds all C# / .NET ecosystem development.

I'm not sure why they do not open source the debugger. I suppose it is obvious to some extent that some companies (JetBrains) are able to charge for high quality tooling. Microsoft makes a trickle of money from Visual Studio professional.

Though the objective function and decision variables are somewhat opaque, this is clearly an optimization problem.

I prefer Rider as a C# IDE whether it's Windows or Linux, although the last time I was doing this there were still a handful of things you needed VS for.

Yes, since VS2022 became 64-bit app it is much more pleasant to use now.

It better be at a 30GB install size.

A 2TB nvme drive is less than $200. If VS is saving significant dev time, people would install it even if much larger install.

I think people question why VS is so freaking huge when it's contemporaries are not.

Most of that disk size is supposedly in the toolchain (requiring 2-60GB of disk space alone[1]). Why is this so big? Modern toolchains from other vendors are not this large.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022...

I have spotted someone that has never done Apple, Google, UNIX or game console native development.

It turns out native code for all kinds of OS workloads take some space.

I'm not sure it's 10x as nice as competitors, which is the context here. If it were just about space who cares, but when your competitor does the exact same at a much smaller size and ultimately better price too, it's a little confusing what is going on with VS.

It needs to be 10x nicer to make up for a 10x disk space footprint? What if it were only 1GB and the competitors were only 100Mb? Would it still need to be 10x nicer?

The competitor doesn't ship a full OS SDK for all kinds of development.

Go see how much GB, Apple or Android development stacks require.

    $ pacman -Qi emacs | grep Size 
    Installed Size  : 111,46 MiB

I guess if anything you is Emacs Lisp, targeting the Emacs OS, then ok.

IDK if it's related but I have like a 50% install success rate. Seems to be complicated.

Come on, my whole OS fits 3 times into that, let alone every single other programming language’s build tools with debug symbols, everything combined.

So what exactly does VS save you? Hell, I can’t even imagine what’s inside that.

Also transparent compression is a thing in case you need to squeeze out more space. And I don't mean the shoddy NTFS active compression. It received support for much more efficient compression algorithms since win10 which are accessible using compact.exe[0], albeit passive rather than active so there is decay once files get modified.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

Install size depends on the features you pick when you install. Web / service / library development is small, desktop / mobile / C++ gets bigger as the toolchains + sdks + emulators are big. If your VS install is 30 GB and that's a problem, run the installer, click modify, and uncheck stuff you're not using. A lot of devs check off everything "just in case" but since you can add other features when you need them, it's better to start with what you know you'll use.

Mine's generally around 10GB as I omit all the mobile dev stack and images.

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