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Comment by catlover76 | Hacker News Reader

> I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma.

There's that, but there's also the developer experience and functionality for people to run it on Mac and Linux.

We have a small C# service that we run locally via Docker (which I think is usually the optimal setup anyways) and develop with VSCode. Since it's small, it has worked well. Would it work well if that was our main backend? Not sure.

Wish I had the option of full Visual Studio on Mac for it regardless.

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I'm founder of a 100% .NET based company (15 years, 1mil LOC), all development happens on Macs, production servers run linux. No issues so far.

No, really, I'm facing more issues from Cursor based based on a year-old upstream version of VSCode than from this, heh...

You can run .NET natively on Mac, if you wish. I would also recommend JetBrains Rider over VSCode; it works on Linux, Mac, and Windows and, in my opinion, is better than Visual Studio anyway.

I use Rider† daily to write F# and C# on my Mac. It works great, I have no issues with it. It even handles the .NET Framework 4.8 code‡ that I maintain without any issues thanks to Mono.

† And Neovim occasionally, but I mostly use it for Typescript or anything that isn't F#/C#.

‡ https://github.com/nozzlegear/shopifysharp

Rider is your option there, it's better than Visual Studio (I used to work on VS).

How is it so different than Visual Studio that you think it is "better"?

I switched over entirely to Rider as well, in my experience it's far more performant, has a far smoother UX, has a lot more functionality for power users, and includes Resharper by default, giving you access to a bunch more powerful inspections and refactoring.

Offers essentially everything VS does + everything ReSharper does. I switched after years of using VS + R#, and have never looked back.

performance!

Pick literally any Visual Studio feature. Rider does it better.

I've used Rider for several years now on and off. Generally I would put these at the top of the list.

- Integrated ReSharper.

- Far better performance (it isn't even close)

- Doesn't take 30GB of disc space up. Visual Studio has been a massive disc space hog since forever. Rider is a few hundred megabytes IIRC.

- Less bugs (Visual Studio has been progressively getting worse).

- There was better tooling IMO around NuGET.

>- Less bugs (Visual Studio has been progressively getting worse).

Eeeeeeh...it's not quite roses and rainbows on the Rider side either, and that's coming from a Jetbrains fanboy. (Although admittedly, I'm not really up-to-date on the current state of VS in day-to-day work)

But yeah, the coding/refactoring support (Resharper et al) and general quality and integration of tooling (database tools, package managers, version control, debugging (esp. multi-process) etc.) is the big one for me.

> Eeeeeeh...it's not quite roses and rainbows on the Rider side either, and that's coming from a Jetbrains fanboy

Obviously. IME it is better than Visual Studio.

> But yeah, the coding/refactoring support (Resharper et al) and general quality and integration of tooling (database tools, package managers, version control, debugging (esp. multi-process) etc.) is the big one for me.

I rarely use any of these tools tbh. I just want Resharper and something that works reliably on Linux. I would transition to using vim entirely but half the vim stuff I like using I can't use with Windows (work is never not going to use Windows).

Much better UX and integrated ReSharper.

Yep.

VSCode gets you 90% there.

But IMO Rider gets you over 100%.

There used to be a Visual Studio for Mac (since retired) but they never could get it right in comparison to the Windows version.

VS Code on a Mac works great and with the ability to run SQL Server in Docker you can have the old stack right there on your Mac.

They couldn't get it right because Visual Studio for Mac was actually a rebranded MonoDevelop, an entirely different IDE than Visual Studio.

I have a much better dev experience on Linux/Rider than on Windows/VS.

I work at a large enterprise where most of our backend js .NET and I can tell you that the dev team is nearly half and half split between Linux and Mac, and nearly half and half split on using VS Code and Rider.

Most of our code is deployed on Kubernetes and runs on AWS.

Developer experience means many things to different people. Personally for my most recent project, I used F# and the IDE was Rider and my OS was a form of immutable Fedora (Ublue OS) with devpod and devcontainers and the whole system was the most joyous developer experience I think I have ever had.

I saw a number of key .NET team members use Rider in Youtube videos.

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