Posted by kretaceous 10/24/2024
What are the most compelling reasons to switch? I have heard lots of praise but little substance so far.
For .NET dev it seems hard for any IDE to rival VS Studio's tight integration with the whole MS + .NET ecosystem.
Sadly this has changed: JetBrains does not seem to care very much about F# these days, and Rider has similar bugs to what Visual Studio had in 2016-2020. It is a bad option for F# developers.
On very large solutions I've found VS to be completely unusable.
Is it objectively (significantly) more performant?
How does the MAUI app development experience compare?
Code completion?
IIS-integration?
Debugging?
Look and feel?
WPF / XAML designer?
File explorer?
Git integration?
...
You might like the built in code completions, with the included local LLM. If you've used the Resharper plugin for Visual Studio, you might like that those features come included in Rider. Same with DotPeek, if you like to decompile dependencies to view implementation details. You might also like Rider's built in 3 way merge with magic wand to auto resolve easy conflicts.
If you also develop outside dotnet ecosystem, you might like that Rider has the same UI as Idea (java development) and Webstorm (frontend development), so switching between them is more familiar.
One thing I don't like about Rider is its inline type hints. I think they clutter the code and I usually disable them.
I haven't gone back to Visual Studio in a while, so I can't offer an honest comparison since my experience is a bit outdated.
(But to be honest, I don't really use Rider too much nowadays either. I've mostly switched to VSCode. So take this with a grain of salt. And apologies I didn't address the items you listed. I just wanted to point out the items I personally took note of)
Regarding your points:
> MAUI
No personal experience yet unfortunately on my part
> Code completion
At least on par, basically ReSharper with a few extras. Navigation and refactoring is great and comprehensive.
> IIS
Also no personal experience
> Debugging
Great debugger IMHO. Matches VS, predictive debugging is nice (deemphasizes branches it knows won't run), breakpoint conditions are great (only break on a certain thread, after another breakpoint had been hit, after n hits, ...), shows return values in the watch list automatically, etc.
> Look & feel
Probably personal preference: I prefer its more modern and focused look over VS. If you're into that, its Vim emulation plugin is superb.
> WPF
Not its strong suit. VS is way better here. Rider only has a preview. Annoying: it doesn't use themes for DevExpress-libraries correctly in one project at work.
> file explorer
Pretty much like VS
> Git integration
In my experience nicer than in VS. Exposes git's features more easily than VS. Take it with a grain of salt because I use the CLI mostly anyway.
I hope this helps a bit. But you're probably better off trying it for a while if you can.
Also looks like an online account is required.
if you make a game, then it gets popular what happens ? or some .net api?
I'm always confused by such licensing terms e.g what ended up happening with Unity.
If you're not going to sell it, it's probably not commercial use.
My take would be, when decision to earn money one should buy the license for sure.
I don't think you can somehow pay for previous use and I expect no one will hold it against you.
But at the same time if you "develop non commercially" and you know you will be trying to monetize it most likely it will be hard to prove and no one has resources to catch every such case but remember that you become "big POS" for that.
Which is probably why they're beginning to change their strategy rn with this move ...
Not that I believe in that scenario.
Rider saved me some sanity when I had to work with .Net.
Rider is better either way, but definitely better than alternatives on MacOS.
It's just too bad that their UI is going in the direction of VSCode and others, become more... I guess I could say smartphone-like.
How else am I supposed to get convinced into buying it given the (probably more mature) default choice of VS Studio 22?
Reading about the rationale for this move this seems to be precisely their reason too.
Anyway, might try it out after all now given all the fuss ...
(I say this as someone from a Newly Industrialized Country and I easily afford the all product pack)
But yeah, if you work for low rates, then you have to work more hours to pay for your tools.
Most people in general, I would say. I haven’t tried JetBrains editors in a while, and the “developing country” definition is very unclear in my opinion (and also part of why I roll my eyes at the “what about developing countries?” argument sometimes), but I do think the yearly price looks good for WebStorm at least, as someone living in Colombia.
For reference, at the time of writing, the standard Netflix plan costs 26,900 COP a month, which ends up being 322,800 COP yearly. Meanwhile, WebStorm’s first year comes at 298,541.10 COP post USD -> COP conversion - it isn’t an insignificant sum, but if it offers significant added value, I think it’s a fair price, certainly better than the Netflix pricing. The second year is reduced to 237,967.54 COP, and the third to 177,393.99 COP - that last one is even less than what you’d pay for the Netflix basic plan over a year (202,800 COP).