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.