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Visual Studio 2015 Community is a full-featured world-class IDE that's now free (edit: for OSS or Companies with <$1M Revenue) - which I've now moved to exclusively for all my .NET projects.

I also swear by ReSharper (R#) which IMO pays itself in productivity immensely, so the cost isn't an issue for me.

I also use IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm and Android Studio and IMO they don't match the productivity of VS.NET + R# combo, which I'm putting down to C# being a more enjoyable and toolable language.

It's important to notice that MS have recently shifted their business model around VS.NET where now what used to be the VS 2012/13 Professional edition is now the VS 2015 Community edition which is now free - they're removing the cost barrier into VS.NET (and forgoing VS.NET Revenues) to get more developers onto the .NET platform which will translate into more Windows Server Licenses and Azure revenues.

With this shift, IMO it's fair to assume that if it wasn't for the decade of Windows-specific legacy native code that's in VS.NET they would've also given it away for free on other platforms as well. VS Code is free IDE that they're going to support cross-platform, i.e. I don't think they want to intentionally cripple VS Code to force it as a Gateway drug into VS.NET since that's not their primary revenue strategy for .NET - getting more developers on .NET is.

At the same time I won't recommend VS Code until it's Open Source, you're better off using Atom + Omnisharp combo which is OSS and safe from abandonment and IMO protects end-users should they start loading it with crapware or otherwise become poor stewards of the project, since a fork would be possible.

> what used to be the VS 2012/13 Professional edition is now the VS 2015 Community edition which is now free

Not true. If you are using Visual Studio professionally, rather than for your own personal educational tinkering, then you're only eligible for Community if your company has less than $1 million in revenue. In almost twenty years, I have never worked for a company that would qualify for that condition (and this includes multiple startups). Even if your company is small enough to qualify, then no more than 5 developers are allowed to use Community at once. See section 1(b):

https://www.visualstudio.com/support/legal/mt171547

If you are currently using Community for professional work... then either you're an independent freelancer, or else are working for the absolute tiniest of unprofitable companies, or else are violating Microsoft's license terms because you don't understand what they are (like most people, it seems).

Visual Studio Professional is very much still a SKU (https://www.visualstudio.com/vs-2015-product-editions).

> If you are using Visual Studio professionally, rather than for your own personal educational tinkering, then you're only eligible for Community if your company has less than $1 million in revenue.

Or if it, as many companies with more than $1 million in revenue do, develops open source software.

> If you are currently using Community for professional work... then either you're an independent freelancer, or else are working for the absolute tiniest of unprofitable companies, or else are violating Microsoft's license terms because you don't understand what they are.

Or you are a professional developer working on software which is licensed under an OSI-approved open-source license.

Yes, yes, Richard Stallman... I saw your other reply already. :)

While a valid point, surely you would acknowledge that it is a fairly small niche case? I imagine that overwhelmingly, the more common scenario is people using Community to work on non-open source software, simply because they don't fully understand the license terms (or don't care).

> then either you're an independent freelancer, or else are working for the absolute tiniest of unprofitable companies

No it just means your Startup has <$1M Revenue - there are a number of early Startups that comfortably fit within that threshold.

The myth that Community Edition is suitable for general commercial work is shockingly strong.

> ReSharper (R#)

FYI: http://vsrefactoringessentials.com/

Could be said to be an open source 'replacement' for R#. I've only been using it for a short while and while it doesn't do as much as R#, it also doesn't have the performance cost of R# (which is downright obnoxious if you are used to working without R#).

> The only serious IDE is Windows-specific, starts at $600 for the typical company (with advanced editions costing more than a small car)... and THEN you need to pay $200 more for a JetBrains add-on called ReSharper

This is completely ludicrous to me. Is it really that much better than just using emacs, vim, sublime text etc? I've written thousands upon thousands of lines of code with just a text editor (for which I've paid either nothing or very little) and my code runs just as well. It's just text at the end of the day, after all, and most of these editors can give you syntax highlighting, tab completion, linting, etc. For complex build procedures, there's make or any number of other free options. What exactly does one gain from these IDEs that can justify these kinds of price tags?

1) It's that much better yes. I'm not going to start an endless discussion on text editors vs IDE's, but for an ecosystem designed from the ground up to handle hundreds of related projects with hundreds of contributors with different roles, and huge class libraries with static types, it's a massive productivity boost to have everything integrated (source control, testing, profiler, ...). For languages that aren't in this category (such as C or JavaScript) the story is completely different.

2) The community edition is free.

You're comparing an editor to an Integrated Development Environment. It's really apples and oranges.

The pure editor part of VS (and most IDE's) is probably worse than emacs/vim. However, you do not get refactoring, profiling, source-control, code-sensitive completion and all that other jazz that IDE's provide, all in one package and in more-or-less the same interface.

Sure, there's probably plugins for vim/emacs that do all of these, but do they all work together well and how much time/expertise do you need to set them up.

Now that doesn't necessarily make an IDE better, I fully expect some people do code faster/better in vim than in VS, but it certainly provides a lot of added value/features.

If all you did was write code then, you're right, text editors are just as capable as IDEs.

However, a decent IDE often has options that make building and debugging easier to manage. For example, one of the 'killer features' of VS is IntelliTrace debugging (a form of historical debugging). Does your text editor offer something similar?

https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Histor...

I've been using VS 2013 Community (which is free) since it got released and I don't miss any of the "premium" features.

For personal tinkering, that's great (as long as you don't mind running on Windows, which is no longer the case with most web developers these days).

However, if you work for any reasonably established company, then it is illegal for you to use that Community Edition for company work. Your company must purchase a license for you, and that starts at $600 for the licensed equivalent of Community.

Perhaps that's perfectly fair. However, it's a huge bit of friction for a developer trying to introduce C# into their shop for the first time.

In the past, I've been able to lobby Java-based employers to let me write some internal apps in Scala. I've been successful in introducing a Golang web service. In both situations, I was asking a manager to take a chance on some unfamiliar tech, and on the risk that it would be hard to maintain if I left the company. However, and this is key... I was NOT asking them to approve any budget. So I won!

If I have to convince a manager to take some risks, AND to approve budget for $600 per seat, then forget it. I'll just wait a couple of years and see if Visual Studio Code gets open-sourced and turns into a sufficient VS replacement. If it doesn't, then .NET will continue to be something I tinker with in my personal time for hobby projects only (at most).

The bottom line is that pricing for .NET developer tools is ABSURDLY out of line with typical pricing for other dominant platforms today (i.e. Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc). Shops that are all-in on Microsoft across the board are just used to that, but it makes .NET completely non-competitive for potential new users outside that bubble.

It's the 21st-century now. You make your money in production (i.e. cloud platforms, proprietary app servers, support services, etc). Trying to make a buck off developer tools is daft. Developers have too many options to choose from these days, you'll just bleed mindshare like that.

What parts of VS Code do you want open sourced?

VS Code utilises[1] OmniSharp-Roslyn[2] (which is an open source project not started by MS) to provide intellisense and refactoring for C#.

If you want to use something that is fully open-sourced (since day 1) and also utilises OmniSharp Roslyn, then check out OmniSharp Atom [3], which is an Atom plugin written mostly in TypeScript. OmniSharp Atom and OmniSharp Roslyn are both very welcoming of contributions. So if there's something that you see that's missing, feel free to send a PR :)

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/languages#_c35

[2] https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-roslyn

[3] https://atom.io/packages/omnisharp-atom

That's a fair point. I tend to overlook Atom in general because its startup time is slow as molasses compared to VS Code (and especially Vim or Notepad++). However, it's still in early days too, and hopefully will improve over time. Still, VS Code is working toward debugger support and a general "IDE feel" that I'm not sure is in Atom's future. We'll see.

To be honest, as long as VS Code is free-as-in-beer, has a plugin-in system that's flexible enough for the community to go nuts with, and can adequately serve as the primary development environment for an ASP.NET app... then I'm delighted.

However, perceptions mean a lot, and in the long-run I just don't see it getting uptake from the Python/Ruby/Node.js crowd without being open source. More of a marketing issue than anything else (although there's also the concern that MS could abandon it someday).

If it's been a little while since you last looked at Atom, then consider trying it again, they've spent some effort on optimising it lately. I mean, it's still not the speediest around, but it's improved leaps and bounds from even a few months ago. It is obviously not the only editor with an OmniSharp plugin. There are many others. [1]

I believe that debugging support on VS Code is currently limited to Node and Mono (and that's only on OS X/Linux) [2]. The team(s) behind OmniSharp (that is the various editor plugins) do desire bringing debugging support to one or more editors.

[1] http://www.omnisharp.net/#integrations [2] https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/debugging#_common-questio...

> However, if you work for any reasonably established company, then it is illegal for you to use that Community Edition for company work.

Not if your "reasonably sized company" develops open source software, it isn't.