Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 vs. Jetbrains Rider
I have been using Visual Studio in subsequent versions for 10 years. I have never had any major problems with this environment. It had its advantages and disadvantages, but despite a few inconveniences, I believe that it has served its purpose for so many years.
Author:
Łukasz, Team Leader
Working in this IDE became even more fun when we purchased a JetBrains ReSharper. Life has become easier and more enjoyable and code refactor much less time consuming. With the new license, JetBrains offered us Rider – his own IDE at a very good price. You can find quite a few articles on the Internet about why Rider is better than VS. Therefore, I also decided to check whether the transition to Rider would be painless for us, because it certainly is profitable.
Rider vs. VS
I was wondering, for example, how long it would take me to get used to the new look and whether there would be any problems, e.g. with building a walkthrough and running unit tests.
Starting with the installation, it is much faster and less strenuous than VS. The appearance configuration is very similar to that in VS. A pleasant surprise awaited me when opening a new walkthrough. Regardless of whether we open it from the menu or by clicking on it, Rider always asks whether to open the walkthrough in a new window or in an existing one.
Rider starts slightly faster than VS. Tests on one of my walkthroughs showed that VS started in 15 seconds and the Rider only needed 8 seconds. Rider runs much smoother when opening more walkthroughs, despite the fact that my test showed that the Rider uses more RAM.
Compilation went smoothly, nuggets downloaded correctly and all automated tests ran properly.
I quickly got the new basic abbreviations. The navigation is very intuitive, I found everything on the first day or in the next few days, without searching on the Internet or asking colleagues who have already worked with Rider.
The biggest positive surprise is the auto-preview search. Thanks to this functionality, we can not only find where the searched phrase appears in the code, but also how it is placed in the code along with the surrounding lines of code.
There is no rose without a thorn
Of course, Rider is not without its flaws. After a few days, we found a bug in updating service references. Some people find a few shortcomings a problem. Rider has no Immediate window for debugging, and “Data tips”. The most annoying, however, seems to be the lack of an editor for resx files. Rider is working on the latter, but for 4 years it didn’t get the right priority.
Time for a change
In summary, despite a few disadvantages, after 10 years of working with VS, I decided to switch to Rider. Many of my colleagues also started testing it. Maybe you will try it too?
Finally, a few facts about the Rider:
- supports most .NET, .NET Core projects,
- is multi-platform – works with Windows, macOS and Linux,
- has a built-in Resharper,
- supports the unit tests of NUnit and xUnit.net,
- the version control systems it supports are: Git, Subversion, Mercurial, Perforce and TFS,
- has a built-in decompiler,
- can be extended with a large number of plugins.
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Sources:
<a href=”https://senordeveloper.net/posts/rider-vs-visual-studio/”>Rider vs Visual Studio</a>
<a href=”https://medium.com/@whardwicksmith/visual-studio-vs-rider-904d63d88f53″>Visual Studio or Rider? Comparing the old and the new</a>
<a href=”https://medium.com/@jashan/going-from-visual-studio-to-rider-4b69320f91f2″>Going from Visual Studio to Rider</a>
<a href=”https://pawelskaruz.pl/2017/04/alternatywa-dla-visual-studio-rider-od-jetbrains/”>Alternatywa Dla Visual Studio? Rider Od JetBrains</a>
<a href=”https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/compare/rider-vs-visual-studio/”>JetBrains Rider vs Visual Studio (with and without ReSharper)</a>
