Code Editors or Visual Studio?

Visual Studio has long been the editor that is used for anything .NET related. Over the years Visual Studio has picked up a huge number of capabilities from editing python to generating databases and deploying your applications directly to Azure. The downside to this is that Visual Studio has become bloated and, in many case, slow. Much of the functionality in Visual Studio has been recreated in external tools such as gulp or powershell. With this tooling in place it is now possible to build your applications without ever opening Visual Studio. The tools long used by developers outside of the Microsoft sphere have become available to us. Sublime, brackets, atom.io have now been joined by Visual Studio Code as companions or even replacements for full versions of Visual Studio. Will you start using these tools or are you still satisfied with full Visual Studio?



6 comments

Simon Timms
5/21/2015 4:30:00 AM
I use a couple of editors at the moment because I'm not satisfied with any of them. Visual studio is my go to for .net code but right now there is poor support for highlighting ES6 and JSX so I have to drop out of it when I'm working on that. Atom is my next favorite editor. I mostly just use it for JavaScript as well as random text files that I need to get into quickly. Finally I still have a copy of sublime around. I had given up on it because development was stalled but it is still the best tool for editing large files. I find visual studio drags on files with long lines and atom is a total disaster with large files. I have VS Code installed but I haven't really got into working with it. Seems like it could be a good replacement for atom and possibly full VS when I'm working on ASP.net 5 applications. The short of it is that there is room for more than one editor and I'm happy to see that we're putting some effort into it and not all sticking with notepadd++.

Robert Greyling
5/21/2015 10:44:22 AM
I'm happy with Visual Studio for .NET, but just like @stimms I've moved over to Atom for JavaScript dev mainly because of ES6 support. I'm guessing with VS2015 there will be better support. And I'm also guessing now the VS team will have thought about the fast evolution of syntax, and just how inadequate VS2013 was at having to have custom editors for all the highlighting and error checking support, that they will have built in a way to update Visual Studio editors without having to wait until the next version. If they have done that right, then maybe VS2015 will be all it needs to be for all code, but then it makes me question why they have brought out VS Code. I've used VS Code, but still find crucial things missing like ReSharper and Unit testing support so I can't see it taking over any time soon. But I'm excited about this new landscape of editors all the same...

rtpHarry
5/21/2015 1:15:31 PM
I think Visual Studio Code has some good potential as a lightweight editor. I guess they had to make something to support the new cross-platform features of ASP.NET5 and after the dust settles Visual Studio Community will probably still reign supreme on Windows platforms. I think the debugging support that they are working on and the speed of it will be a big differentiator in this space where they are competing with the likes of Sublime, Atom, etc. Obviously its an early version at the moment and they need to get the extensions support in there before it will really take off. I was doing WordPress theme development and embracing Less, Grunt, and all that family of technology recently and I started out with Sublime, then moved over to Atom. For some reason they both suck at keeping the code formatting. I kept missing CTRL-K. CTRL-D functionality. Even installing the extensions Atom kept getting it wrong and indenting. I wasn't really expecting such a minor feature to be absent in the major players, maybe it was just me.

Mike Johnson
5/21/2015 1:29:35 PM
for those not knowing. VS has extensions that introduce the Task Runner Explorer which gives you grunt/gulp/npm support in VS before VS2015 is release VS 2015 will have it baked in... Hanselman wrote a nice article on it: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingGulpGruntBowerAndNpmSupportForVisualStudio.aspx

Ryan Riley
5/21/2015 11:44:57 PM
Let's not forget vim and emacs! Though older, both have a lot to offer, and you can find tools that go beyond syntax highlighting for both. I find vim a natural fit when working with git, and I always find emacs users' use of that tool quite astounding. In many ways, none of the new editors offer quite the same level of efficiency.

Jeremy Morgan 
5/22/2015 4:14:14 AM
I love Visual Studio for my day job. I work on enterprise software with a group of people, under control of TFS, etc. I have tools in VS that help me debug stuff better and VS is a crucial part of my workflow. The VS hotkeys make sure I'm productive, and since we're all on the same platform development is (relatively) smooth. The last few months, at "home" my projects have increasingly been in Sublime with OmniSharp. My "pet projects" or goof around stuff is just fine with that. I'm at the point in my knowledge in C# where intellisense isn't necessary (hey I'll admit it took a while) and slapping together some stuff in sublime is just smoother and easier. Not to mention I can do it on a Mac or in Linux. So it really depends on what you're using it for. I love Omnisharp and Sublime but I don't see them replacing VS in the enterprise anytime soon. There is a significant difference in a project with 50 programmers working on it, and a project with one or two.