Session

Why I switched from Visual Studio to Jetbrains Rider and (almost) never look back

As long as I’ve been developing with Visual Studio, I remember I’ve been looking for add-ons to make me more productive. In 2004, I discovered JetBrains’ ReSharper. It improved Intellisense, the coloring of identifiers, the many built-in refactorings, it felt like a new world opened up to me. But I also noticed that with every new Visual Studio and ReSharper release the memory and CPU footprint increased a lot. In 2016, JetBrains announced Rider, a full-blown IDE for .NET and C# developers based on there wildly successful IntelliJ IDE and all the power of ReSharper. By the end of 2017, I fully switched to Rider and I never looked back.

In the mean time, I regularly started to run into people that switched back to a bare-bones Visual Studio installation and told me that they didn’t miss anything. So I started to wonder. Did Visual Studio really get so much better since the last time I tried? Did Microsoft finally get the message and pick up the pace in building a productive IDE? To see how much Microsoft has evolved, I decided to try it myself. This is what I learned.

Dennis Doomen

Hands-on architect in the .NET space with 26 years of experience on an everlasting quest for knowledge to build the right software the right way at the right time

The Hague, Netherlands

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