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Comment by SDGT | Hacker News Reader

VS lock in is a very real thing. At my current employer, there is no way they could ever come off of VS and .Net because of the lack of polyglots in the office. There is one of us that does Java, 3 that do PHP (only in the last 6 months), and 6 that are set up for .Net MVC. Management just can't spare the costs to retrain, and none of these guys go home and code on non MS platforms.

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I could switch languages more easily than I could switch dev environment. The lock in to me is bssically simply that there aren't many other good language+IDE combos out there. There are plenty of languages that are interesting but very few come with a great IDE. I'd love to do Rust or Haskell all day, but I'm sure as hell not going to vim/emacs/sublime from VS. I almost envy those who never started using and IDE and can be productive with a text editor, their threshold to switch language is much Lower. Luckily VS at least supports C++, F#, JS and python so it's not impossible to cover quite a lot of languages in it.

I love Visual Studio, but many of the JetBrains IDEs are great too, like WebStorm and PyCharm.

Yep, and VS isn't really "complete" without resharper which is a shame because the full versions of VS are already quite expensive.

I tried out Resharper for the entire evaluation period and then dropped it. There were a few nice things, but nothing that was just leaps and bounds better than built in VS features. But everyone says it's necessary, so I keep wondering if I somehow missed the killer features.

What are the features of Resharper that make you say VS isn't complete without it?

In my experience it isn't one, two, or even three killer features. It's the aggregate additional polish and productivity increase gleaned from 10 to 20 minor features that shave fractions of seconds and remove a click or two off of incredibly common actions. And I just use the default settings.

I've tried it a few times now, and never stuck with it.

I think it's because I find the VS interface incredibly cluttered anyway, and Resharper just makes it worse. The right click menus are already 10 miles long filled with useless clutter and when it starts mucking around with the already edging towards overwhelming intellisense pop-ups it just annoyed me one too many time.

After 2 weeks of trialling it then only thing I was really using was the "go to implementation..." but I've long since given up on the ridiculousness of making everything mockable anyway so it's only occasionally useful.

The worst thing about VS is how slow it can be sometimes, even on incredibly powerful machines. In the end it's a glorified text editor and everything should be secondary to that.

There's nothing more annoying than pressing ctrl-f (find) and then have it pause for 1/2 a second because it's trying to parse a massive html tree for intellisense you don't even need because you're just trying to delete a single node you know the name of.

I agree the slowness of find (Ctrl+F) and the slowness of the xml/html parsers is still the worse thing about it. I can see how tag soup is hard to parse, but well formed xml should parse in milliseconds. On the bright side, with a good go-to-symbol, go-to-file, go-to-type etc., I search much less for free text.

The text editor is only a tiny part of an IDE, the bits that are added are quite important. Integrated debugging (with edit+continue while debugging), integrated version control interface, integrated build system, integrated profiler and much more makes it so much more productive than having to e.g. do debugging with recompile/restart turnaround times.

> Integrated debugging (with edit+continue while debugging)

That's the main reason to use an IDE, in my mind, along with the ability to display the call sites of a function.

> integrated version control interface,

Never noticed any advantage compared to a shell with git or git-svn, personally.

> integrated build system

Depends what you mean by that. What's precious is the ability to detect errors before doing a build or testing anything. "Integrated build systems" in general I find often fall flat on their face when something outside of the IDE touches the files.

The text editor is by and far the most important part of the IDE and is the only part everyone will use.

It's also the thing that's most important to flow, to producing, not navigating or testing.

That it can pause and stutter when you're just trying to do a simple edit is pretty silly.

I love VS and it's one of the things I always miss whenever using something else, but there's a lot of annoyances and a lot of sub-par features and some you should never use features.

I notice you said "integrated version control interface", if you're talking about TFS, it's terrible. Stop using it. The interface is terrible, all generic tables that you can't tell apart. It's a massive effort to see file changes. And worse than all of that, the actual version control system is shockingly bad, even compared to SVN, let alone Git. You're a madman to be using TFS, it's so bad.

One of the big ones to me is "move class to its own file". Means when you are sketching up some multi-class API or something you can just type away in a single source file, and as soon as something looks half-finihshed I just alt enter and it creates a new file with the correct name and moves the type to that file including adding the necessary imports to the header. A lot of context-switch time gained.

Next big thing is navigation. Go to type, go to symbol and go to file are super quick and means I never go to the source tree to navigate the solution.

I didn't find the "move class" feature while I was trialing, but it does sound pretty handy.

Symbol search is incredibly useful, that was a revelation when somebody told me about it. But Visual Studio has had that since at least 2010, I think maybe 2008. Resharper's is a bit more complete, but I think the VS built-in one is a bit faster. The VS native implementation is Edit -> Navigate To, the default key combo is ctrl-comma, but I think Resharper takes that combo for its own purposes.

I'm curious. What do you find so great about Visual Studio? After working with it for a while, I came to the conclusion that while it's extremely fast, it's not particularly full-featured compared to Eclipse. The amount of refactoring you can do out of the box is minimal, and the search is ridiculously crippled.

I haven't lived with it long enough to find out if it's as easy to break as Eclipse when you install the wrong combination of plugins, though. Oddly enough, its vim emulator plugin is much better than what I found for Eclipse, which I find quite ironic.

That's not what people call lock-in. Then there's Javascript+Sublime lock-in, OCAML lock-in, Emacs lock-in...

Build a huge app in any language and you have technology lock in.

What about Mono? I have no idea how practical this is for real code bases, but I've used it successfully on several smaller projects.

Mono is quite practical. However, C# is one thing, and the .NET Memory Model is quite another.

The memory model is, IMHO, where Microsoft is pushing the limits of the existing C# language.

could someone point to some article that expand on this topic ? thanks

> The memory model is, IMHO, where Microsoft is pushing the limits of the existing C# language.

What has Microsoft changed in the .NET memory model that makes you think they're pushing the limits?

From what I can tell, the .NET memory model is one of the things that has changed the least. The languages have changed a lot faster than the memory model.

I have Mono projects in production. Xamarin Studio is pretty nice these days. I don't have a lot of performance sensitive .Net code so I don't notice any real difference between Microsoft's and Xamarin's implementations.

One problem I'm running into at the moment is I'm trying to port a vendor's reference SOAP Service over to Mono/Linux and their provided secret sauce DLL is blowing up when calling their objects' constructors. I'm yet to pin it on Linux or Mono. Here's hoping the vendor is Mono friendly and willing to debug it. If not we're going to have one oddball Windows server in a sea of Ubuntu EC2 instances.

Same here, a number of Mono apps in production, both on mobile and desktop. A lot of my recent work has to do with OpenGL-related stuff running on Linux using Mono/MonoDevelop. I have had neither performance-related issues nor stability issues.

Ironically, we have some large-ish C# code-bases that run on everything but Windows.

Personally, I find Xamarin Studio to be quite buggy, often needing several quit+restart a day (I do iPhone apps), a colleague also does Android apps with Xamarin (on Windows) and experiences similar problems.

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