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Comment by vonseel | Hacker News Reader

What is the best setup for coding .NET core on Mac? Rider? Asking because you seem to know what you’re talking about.

Microsoft's Docs for getting started are pretty great:

https://www.microsoft.com/net/learn/get-started/macos

On mac they appear to be recommending visual studio code with the c# extension. I'd agree that that makes for a decent experience.

Alternatively:

Rider: https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/ VS for Mac: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/mac/

Rider is definitely the best IDE for .NET, regardless of platform.

I very much doubt it, given how InteliJ works on my laptop versus Visual Studio 2017.

Also where are Blend, the GUI tooling and rich debugging features from VS?

It is, I use both frequently and use Rider whenever I can and VS 2017 when working on projects Rider doesn't support. Although I don't use Designers so if you're building .NET GUI Apps VS 2017 would be better, but Rider is better for Web Apps, esp. Single Page Apps.

VS 2017 is the most unstable I can recall in recent memory, with constant crashes and White Screens of Death.

> VS 2017 is the most unstable I can recall in recent memory, with constant crashes and White Screens of Death.

Hmm, opposite of my experience. VS 2010 was the worst, and VS 2017 is actually pretty nice. Very frequent updates though, which is a little annoying.

2017 gets to be a little bit of a problem if you've got the Git tooling and ReSharper both going at the same time. On bigger solutions you're going to be hammering your disk swapping, so better hope you've got your code on an SSD, and that you've got exceptions in your antivirus to avoid real-time scanning those locations.

Thanks for the info all above posters. Sounds like dislikes for Rider are mostly from Windows users or people who need GUI support. I'm on Mac and have a lot of experience with Jetbrains IDE's so that's probably my best option.

I tried Rider may be 2-3 months ago and it was much much slower than Visual Studio 2017. I also had problems with font rendering (I use DPI > 100%) and all dialogs like open file are non-native, but from Java. Looks completely different than standard dialogs from Windows. So I will continue to use VS2017.

+1 for Rider or VSCode, twice Ive taken a laptop to a remote location and havent been able to login to VS and hence get no work done. The partner licensing for VS is apparently at fault.

Rider presumably is better than VSCode if you do a lot of refactoring. If not, it's an overkill, and VSCode or slightly heavier Visual Studio for Mac are your best options.

I like VS Code for developing .NET Core Apps on OSX, it's a nice lightweight IDE with great multi terminal support. When your project gets larger Rider starts to become a good option, but if you're developing Web Apps, VS Code is better with greater support for SPA formats like Vue's SFC's, React's JSX, etc.

Thanks for the insight! Good answer.

I'm flattered, but unfortunately I'm not a mac person.

VSCode and Rider are the two standouts. I love VSCode on windows and Linux, but I have heard nothing but good things about Rider.

Visual Studio for Mac from Microsoft.

https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/mac/

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