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Comment by oleksandr_kot | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Omnisharp-VsCode extension for years on my daily job. It's far from ideal, especially the initial setup experience.

I think here's what's going on: It appears VS Code is Microsoft's main IDE and C# is the main language. Not surprised they decided to obtain more control over the integration to improve the experience. In terms of management, it's always easier to cut all the external dependencies (community) and "just do it", even though it's absolutely against the open source spirit and definitely will hurt their community relationships and the trust.

Can't say the decision is an absolute evil.

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I can echo this, while doing its job most of the time, Omnisharp has been one of the least stable parts of my VS Code C# experience (the least stable as usual being anything relating to Unity ;) ).

Issues like runaway compiler threads, slow response times, OmniSharp frequently losing the mono-path and requires restart (this is some config issue and interaction with Unity, but could have been handled automatically).

It's sensible to improve the C# experience on VS Code, but not saying the way MS is doing it here is the best way.

Ah, no wonder I felt unproductive with C# on VSCode. I couldn't wrap my head around that it is now how you should write C# code with such bad intellisense n stuff.

A few years ago I spent a couple of months using C# w/ vscode. The experience was indeed harrowing.

Omnisharp would take forever to start up (always downloading a new Omnisharp binary on every restart for some reason?!), type checking was unresponsive to the point of being unusable, and the whole thing would freeze and stop working entirely every once in a while, requiring me to reload the IDE. I tried various versions of Omnisharp (stable/beta) across many C# projects and several vscode deployments on multiple machines and never got it to work well. I eventually decided Omnisharp would never improve and abandoned vscode because of how uniformly bad it was for C#.

I think VS Code was supposed to be a "gateway drug" to VS. It's not turning out that way. If they can't get the users to go full VS, they probably have an idea they can sell some of the backend stuff, but they can't right now since there is not a way to plug it in. OmniSharp is probably going to remain the default, but MS is betting a number of people will pony up for better(their) backends.

I believe it is more nuanced. They needed a web based technology for the future. And VS itself is a technology monster. Also LSPs took over.

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