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Comment by Zambyte | Hacker News Reader

> developer tools (Visual Studio) that works across Windows, macOS, and Linux

Dang I was really excited when I saw this because I thought I missed something, but still only support for Windows :(

They might have meant Visual Studio Code, which due to Microsoft's continued commitment to naming things poorly, causes a good deal of confusion. VS Code doesn't have all the features of Visual Studio but it's turning into its own impressive ecosystem that even diehard Microsoft haters love.

You almost can’t even escape it at this point. VS Code ecosystem is a beast.

The only reason why I tolerate that Electron app, is exactly some tooling only supporting it, e.g. VS Code is now the official IDE for Powershell.

There's also Jetbrains Rider for .net on mac & Linux (google it)

& Windows

Because it's better than VS anyway ;)

I'm familiar. I was looking for Visual Studio, which is not Rider.

Visual Studio for Mac is a thing and I find it pretty good. It doesn't feel as feature complete as the Windows version, but I've never found anything I couldn't work around.

Unfortunately it's being retired at the end of August next year. Thanks a bunch Microsoft.

https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/

is amazing and cross-platform. From the same authors of ReSharper plugin for Visual Studio.

Rider and VS Code are slowly killing Visual Studio for .NET development. Unless you're using .NET Framework (legacy framework with confusing name), you're likely better served using anything else.

For a long time, the only reason I ever needed to open VS was for WinForms and WPF visual editing. Earlier this year, Rider implemented a WYSIWYG editor for those frameworks. I think based on Avalonia.

Now I have no reason to use VS at all, and my life is better for it

> Rider and VS Code are slowly killing Visual Studio for .NET development.

You're probably right, but I never understand the dislike for VS on HN. For me it's s a reliable, capable tool.

My only complaint with VS is that it's optimal resource requirements always seem to be just beyond the limits of my work issued machine. Functionally I have no issues with it and it's worlds better than a lot of other IDEs that I've used.

Could you share the specs of your mschine? Visual Studio seems to run decently on my 4 GB laptop with an 8th generation i3 CPU. It does have an SSD though.

It does not run perfectly though. There is definitely a difference in input lag between VS and Sublime text.

I have an i9-9880H with 16GB of RAM, I'm in the queue for an upgrade.

VS 2022 Enterprise takes a solid 78 seconds to load to the "Open recent" splash page and idles there at 5%. Opening a 16 project solution takes another 34 seconds and the CPU hovers around 48-67% CPU for a minute after opening the solution before dropping down to around 6%. Any coding causes CPU spikes with each keystroke up to 67%. Loading a 150 line class is pretty instantaneous but it takes another 15-20 seconds for the references, last changes, collapsible UI, and inherit/override dialogs to appear.

It always feels like I'm waiting, even if it's just 5 or 10 seconds, for what I need.

Huh. That seems odd to me but I only open 1 project solutions with not more than ~5 files open at a time, with no other applications other than my browser running. But those CPU spikes upon each keystroke seems very odd indeed.

Yes, VS has been terribly slow all the years. Having 64g RAM doesn’t always help much. Rider is fine on 16g, though the most recent release turned a bit sluggish after updating the SDK from RC2 to final, likely something misconfigured on my machine.

I think it is because of the usual HN-esque disdain for corporate products and their urge to exercise their freedom to choose other products.

Except VS is the first party IDE, and Microsoft already acknowledged VS Code will never provide feature parity with VS.

Rider, being a 3rd party IDE, will always be playing catchup with VS and .NET tooling from Microsoft.

> Microsoft already acknowledged VS Code will never provide feature parity with VS.

That's correct and misleading. The features that VS supports that aren't present in VS Code are mostly legacy features that need to exist for legacy support reasons and are not being utilized in modern development.

Like native desktop Windows applications, and server profiling tooling?

This has been asserted by Microsoft employees in .NET podcasts, and on twitter, maybe start paying attention?

Microsoft just introduced some features taken from Rider in Visual Studio, who’s catching up with whom? I think it’s a good way of competition.

I'll second Rider. Well worth the money, in my experience. I use Rider products exclusively on Linux, and they tend to work well.

Others have mentioned Rider, which is excellent.

If you're looking for a free alternative, VS Code with the most recent .NET/C# extensions is a very good experience. Good enough that I suspect it is the reason MS felt it no longer worth maintaining Visual Studio for Mac.

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