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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

> Call me skeptical, but there's not a whole lot of products I willfully pay Microsoft for.

I have met many, many people who gladly pay for Office (specifically, Excel) or Visual Studio, so much does it increase their productivity. I'm not one of them, but I'm not an accountant and the code bases I work with are small and don't require VS's incredible tooling.

There are also adherents of the cult of Visio, but I honestly can't fathom what they see in it.

Microsoft can be faulted for many things, but the reason it is so successful is that it made some really good products that still haven't been surpassed.

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I strongly agree on Office/Excel. Fantastic product suite (except maybe Outlook which is long in the tooth/essentially unimproved for the last ten years).

Visual Studio I'll slightly disagree on. I resent it. When VSCode, an electron application, can run lag/stutter/micro-freeze free and Visual Studio an IDE written in C++ cannot you know the codebase has become unmaintainable. This isn't a recent phenomenon either. This has been a nuisance in VS 2015, 17, and now 19 (16.4 Preview).

I'd love to switch to VSCode but the csprojec/C# support isn't there yet. I don't need a forms builder, server explorer, EDMX designer, test explorer, and all the other bells and whistles VS offers. I use VS strictly to write code (C# MVC/Web), run, and repeat. The refactoring tools/Intellisense/IntelliCode/QuickFixes are awesome but if I could trade them all for a lag free experience I would in a second.

I'm using a i7 (6th gen)/16 GB of RAM/SSD. I have no extensions except the built-in ones and Web Compiler/Bundler & Minifier. It doesn't help.

I'm also not a fan of VS. From my perspective it is an overly complicated bloated software. But I think that way about quite a lot of software.

However, the developers I've spoken with who love it tell me that it has some insanely good tooling that is just unmatched by anything else. I'm not even in a position to know what they're talking about or why it's so important to them, but that doesn't mean they don't know what they're talking about.

For one, it has the only decent C++ debugger in existence.

> Visual Studio I'll slightly disagree on. I resent it.

I agree. Visual Studio has a tendency to make me actively angry.

Like when you double click a .cpp file intending to take a quick look in Notepad, and your whole computer grinds to a halt as it fires up VS

What, you don't like your editor freezing when it tries to look up a symbol?

Do you have AV interfering with any intermediate files, etc? I know for MVC/ASP.NET once I blacklisted the overbearing AV scans on a few of those directories all my woes disappeared.

For whatever reason I have the opposite experience, VScode input lag is painful at times and VSPro is minimal. As you know once you master an IDE, keyboard shortcuts and common keywords are typically being entered at 200wpm+ in bursts and its quite noticeable. Initial startup is definitely poor for both.

> I don't need a forms builder, server explorer, EDMX designer, test explorer, and all the other bells and whistles VS offers.

Same. CodeLens gets immediately disabled. Makes me wonder if there would be a way to hack up a stripped down "VS Lite".

Rider is really nice for c# - runs quite a bit better than vs

The genius of Microsoft is in the long-term thinking. The individual products are easily critiqued. Their planning often mistimes stuff or gets caught out by new developments, and they play a lot of hardball to get where they want to go (which has never made anyone look good), but when they hit, they hit big, and make not just a product but an entire kingdom, which has all the downsides of monopoly but also substantial upside too.

While the Ballmer years saw the company coast along on its old crown jewels, missing nearly every opportunity, Nadella's MSFT has shaped up to be one that is building a few new kingdoms - in the cloud space, open dev tools, new consumer hardware (see the upcoming Surface lineup) - it's definitely not the Windows + Office company of old.

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