8 ms·

There are people on record that it was the Azure division head Scott Guthrie who gave permission to open source ASP.NET Core (which at the time was part of Azur

by oaiey 5y ago

There are people on record that it was the Azure division head Scott Guthrie who gave permission to open source ASP.NET Core (which at the time was part of Azure). Later the asp.net team merged with the .net team and brought the open sourcing with them. VS has no place anymore. The velocity and mindshare is with VS Code. VS with its visual designers had its place .. but desktop is dead and Xamarin competes with frameworks without costly IDEs.

rafaelvasco 5y ago
There's some new smart code suggestion features on VS2022 that I've never seen anywhere else before. But talking about VSCode, it depends. For C# development it doesn't replace VS at all, far from it. Omnisharp is not good enough. There's scenarios and scenarios. I code game development things with C# on VS. And I work professionally coding JS stuff with VSCode. Different scenarios.
selfhoster11 5y ago
VS Code is not a replacement for an IDE. While I only know IntelliJ, I assume VS must be similar. In short, VS Code is a replacement for Notepad, and not for an IDE. It's not as well integrated, not as thought-out and capable. The only thing that saves it IMO is the remote server mode.
- jonathanlydall 5y ago
  VS is my daily driver and I absolutely agree that VS Code doesn’t come anywhere close to a fully fledged IDE like VS. But VS Code is far more just a text editor and that you can run and debug many languages in it in my opinion means it meets the criteria of an IDE. If I was forced to switch from VS to VS Code I would be miserable and feel handicapped, but infinitely more productive than just having a text editor and the dotnet CLI. So VS Code is absolutely a “replacement” for VS, but only for a poor man with a very limited set of required features. All the above being said, I don’t ever see VS Code truly replacing VS, but it’s a competent IDE considering its both cross platform and free as in beer.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  Maybe it feels like an IDE for people used to text editors like VIM. It's probably middle ground between a text editor and an IDE.
fabian2k 5y ago
I mean at this point I have truly no idea what I'm talking about. But I would always bet on Azure against Visual Studio in a fight. The earning potential for Azure is simply far, far higher than for Visual Studio. AWS has shown that the cloud is a recipe for printing money, and I trust Microsoft to follow the money.
- oaiey 5y ago
  Yes. And IMHO Azure wins. But there are managers, goals and compromises. IMHO this was a compromise. The Azure division is interested in a universal available runtime. The tooling group provides a free editor but had goals of earning VS licenses. I can only guess but I think Big Scott, lesser Scott and Julia will have a meeting soon. The .NET community is at a boiling point and they should really avoid a community which takes dev productivity in their own hands. Because that is the garantueed end of visual studio.
  - pxc 5y ago
    > The .NET community is at a boiling point and they should really avoid a community which takes dev productivity in their own hands. Because that is the garantueed end of visual studio. sounds like .NET is almost the kind of thing I'd use then, because in a world without Visual Studio, I might not be punished for choosing to use .NET but not VS
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  I've always thinked of MS as filled with old fashioned managers, caring only about legacy stuff and killing any good initiative MS Research came out with. I was amazed they'd try something new like cloud. I thought they will stick to the desktop and and MS Office until someone will snatch it from their dead cold hands. But Ballmer went and Nadella came. I still think that the company has a lot of Ballmers hidden in a lot of places, waiting for the opportunity to pull the breaks if they sniff that something interesting might happen.
creato 5y ago
Has anything ever actually replaced VS? I've only ever used VS for hobby/side projects, and even 10 years ago it was leaps and bounds better than what I have to use for my professional day to day work now (code completion, debugger are the two things that I miss basically every day). The tools that I use now have these features, but they're such a joke in comparison. The code completion has no notion of "code", it's just looking for similar words.
- moogly 5y ago
  For many workloads (at least .NET), JetBrains Rider. For C/C++ on Windows, well, you have VS Code and also JetBrains CLion, but IMO CLion is surprisingly rougher than Rider, even though it's older. You can get stuff done though.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Good luck doing MFC, ATL, UWP, DirectX debugging with VSCode.
    - moogly 5y ago
      The "some workloads" also apply for that. I don't know about DirectX, but the other ones might be doable as long as you create the project once in VS and then (for MFC and ATL) hand edit the normally tool-generated partial classes. For UWP, you'd have to hand wrangle the XAML. You'd then invoke MSBuild for building. AFAIK there's nothing super special about MFC and ATL that would make debugging impossible, but it's true I've never tried it in VS Code.
  - enhray 5y ago
    For C/C++ on Windows and Linux. CMake build support and cross-platform builds and debugging are available out of the box with Community version of VS.
  - nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
    Rider is a non-starter - doesn't even have a community edition.
tester756 5y ago
>VS has no place anymore. That's exaggeration at best. VS with extensions like Roslynator make C# development really good. VS Code is nice, but I always felt like VS had significantly more reliable Intellisense than VS Code (for C#). but I wish VS (real, not 4Mac) worked on Linux.
- fgonzag 5y ago
  Have you tried Rider? I ditched VS as soon as I found it, but I already used intellij idea for java projects. It works perfectly on Linux.
  - DeathArrow 5y ago
    I did. It's ReSharper with an editor built around it. It doesn't feel better than VS.
kumarvvr 5y ago
> VS has no place anymore I use the community version. VS Code, while being extremely good, is still far behind VS. I love using VS, as a solo developer. The integration it has WRT .NET projects is amazing.
nseggs 5y ago
Desktop is dead?
- oneplane 5y ago
  Desktop for the bulk of generic CRUD apps is dead. But that has always been the case because that's not the main benefit of having a desktop. Same for 'what was your first computer', there is a whole generation (or maybe two of them at this point) that started out with smartphones and didn't get to the 'using a desktop' level until much later when preparation for work life required it.
bmitc 5y ago
> but desktop is dead People keep saying this, but they obviously have no idea. Desktop isn’t dead and nowhere near it. Just because web and mobile app developers think so doesn’t make it true. There are several industries in which desktop applications are a must. Any application with the needs of multiple windows automatically rules out web and mobile stacks, even if they happen to work on desktops.
- brundolf 5y ago
  Electron has full support for multiple windows, and you can even do it with a regular browser app if you get a little creative (windows can talk directly to other windows they create, and/or all windows could talk to the same server and receive push updates via websocket)
  - bmitc 5y ago
    > Electron has full support for multiple windows Can you elaborate? The last time I looked into this (including a little now) showed that, yes, you can create multiple windows, but there are not good solutions for communicating between the windows. Electron's own documentation shows two, options between local storage and Electron's IPC mechanism. From what I've read, IPC is not good for more complex multiple window apps. So one needs to use a local network communication method. https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/faq#how-to-share-data-between-web-pages https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/faq#how-to-share-data... If this is all the case, I would hardly consider it full support.
  - DeathArrow 5y ago
    And old apps written in C++ and running on a Pentium 3 will beat the crap out the Electron app which will feel sluggish even on modern hardware. The only reason Electron exists is to enable Javascript developers do desktop apps without learning other languages and frameworks. Electron is not a solution for desktop development, it's a solution for lazy developers.
- xvilka 5y ago
  > There are several industries I would say most industries. Anything that requires creating any kind of digital content (images, videos, CAD models, electronic schematics, chip design, PCB layout, etc), most of the scientific software, all rely on the computational power and the speed of the desktop applications.
GiorgioG 5y ago
As a long-time .NET Developer, there's no way in hell you're replacing my Visual Studio with Visual Studio Code. I'll sooner switch to Rider (which I have a license for and like to use on a Mac.) VSCode is a text editor on steroids. Visual Studio is an IDE. Full stop.
- foepys 5y ago
  I'm in the same boat. I use VSCode for JavaScript and that is only because I'm required to by my workplace. Otherwise I'd be using Webstorm. VS is on a whole other level than VSCode when it comes to C#. I suspect that many people here haven't really used the IDE features and VS' debugger for more than simple breaking and inspecting a variable. Yes, if you have a hobby project, you can use VSCode instead of VS Community Edition just fine. But if you are dealing with concurrency errors, performance analysis, dump analysis, and very, very large projects, you can't use VsCode. VS' GUI is also a lot more flexible than VSCode's. In VS I can have a lot more information present where in VSCode I need to constantly switch windows.
ynx 5y ago
As a very longtime iOS and Linux dev turned Windows and .NET dev (with some rust on the side) - who has used VSCode, VS, and Xamarin for multiple years - no. There is a place for a featureful IDE with robustly implemented build, debug, and package management capabilities working out of the box with multiple languages and entrenched technologies. I do very much like VSC and use it all the time for anything involving text, markdown, cross-platform C++, javascript, and even rust...but Visual Studio is as much of the Windows or .NET dev's toolkit as Xcode is a part of a dev in the Apple ecosystem. VSCode is great. However, there is plenty of space for VS: it is also very strong, and has a long history of deep and extensive integration into very mature technologies. VS is still getting better year over year and while I see VSCode as competitive in some spaces, it is no contest in others. If VSCode is to replace VS, it has a very long tail of issues to address, the resolution of which would probably raise both boats anyways.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  Even doing Android development with Kotlin feels nice on Visual Studio due to the integration with the emulator. What doesn't feel so nice it's writing C/C++ as intellisense does not help as much as it does for other languages.
- korla 5y ago
  I agree, and the competition is at this point more between VS and other full-featured IDEs like JetBrains Rider, which is my tool of choice for .Net-development. But, what I didn't know until this recent debacle, is how there is a theory that the reason the .Net-tooling in VSCode is so bad is the same reason we had this watch-debacle. There was some discussion on that in the other HN-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28968231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28968231
  - vyrotek 5y ago
    I've become more convinced that VSCode doesn't implement certain features to not compete with VS. For example, support for File Nesting. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/6328 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/6328 For a while there wasn't really another way to run SQL projects outside of VS. Data Studio recently got support for that though.
jessikat 5y ago
Visual Studio does a lot more than just visual designers. The integration for .NET is fantastic. And I love Visual Studio Code for everything else :) Visual Studio still has value.
malkia 5y ago
Visual Studio's debugger alone makes it worth. It's not that it's the most powerful debugger (not like WinDbg), but it's so polished for most things I would typically do, also mixed callstacks for certain languages, Parallel Stacks and certain other features.
dt3ft 5y ago
Good luck debugging anything slightly more complex with VSCode. Desktop is dead? In your bubble perhaps. Look outside.
pjmlp 5y ago
If your world is vim and Emacs, coding like 1990's UNIX, sure. That are endless features on VS that VSCode will never get.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  VS has enabled fast and lazy development for me. I don't have to memorize if a type has a method or property or what parameters a method has. I just type a dot and the IDE will tell me everything I need to know. It's good for concentrating on business logic instead of details of frameworks and libraries, but less good for interview questions if you come around people which have fixation on details.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    And isn't that good? Living the dream of Xerox PARC tooling (as close as it gets). I tend to disregard leetcode interviews anyway, unless I am on a deep need for a job without alternatives.
DeathArrow 5y ago
I still like very much the experience of developing on Visual Studio. And it's not about visual designers because I don't do Windows Forms and WPF. Intellisense and intellicode do a wonderful job with code suggestions, there are lots of tools for formatting, debugging, jumping through code, refactoring, each accessible through shortcuts. It makes the development much faster for me compared to using a text editor. And when .NET MAUI will ship, I guess we will have a visual designer for that.

by oaiey 5y ago

rafaelvasco 5y ago

There's some new smart code suggestion features on VS2022 that I've never seen anywhere else before. But talking about VSCode, it depends. For C# development it doesn't replace VS at all, far from it. Omnisharp is not good enough. There's scenarios and scenarios. I code game development things with C# on VS. And I work professionally coding JS stuff with VSCode. Different scenarios.

selfhoster11 5y ago

VS Code is not a replacement for an IDE. While I only know IntelliJ, I assume VS must be similar. In short, VS Code is a replacement for Notepad, and not for an IDE. It's not as well integrated, not as thought-out and capable. The only thing that saves it IMO is the remote server mode.

jonathanlydall 5y ago
VS is my daily driver and I absolutely agree that VS Code doesn’t come anywhere close to a fully fledged IDE like VS. But VS Code is far more just a text editor and that you can run and debug many languages in it in my opinion means it meets the criteria of an IDE. If I was forced to switch from VS to VS Code I would be miserable and feel handicapped, but infinitely more productive than just having a text editor and the dotnet CLI. So VS Code is absolutely a “replacement” for VS, but only for a poor man with a very limited set of required features. All the above being said, I don’t ever see VS Code truly replacing VS, but it’s a competent IDE considering its both cross platform and free as in beer.
DeathArrow 5y ago
Maybe it feels like an IDE for people used to text editors like VIM. It's probably middle ground between a text editor and an IDE.

fabian2k 5y ago

I mean at this point I have truly no idea what I'm talking about. But I would always bet on Azure against Visual Studio in a fight. The earning potential for Azure is simply far, far higher than for Visual Studio. AWS has shown that the cloud is a recipe for printing money, and I trust Microsoft to follow the money.

oaiey 5y ago
Yes. And IMHO Azure wins. But there are managers, goals and compromises. IMHO this was a compromise. The Azure division is interested in a universal available runtime. The tooling group provides a free editor but had goals of earning VS licenses. I can only guess but I think Big Scott, lesser Scott and Julia will have a meeting soon. The .NET community is at a boiling point and they should really avoid a community which takes dev productivity in their own hands. Because that is the garantueed end of visual studio.
- pxc 5y ago
  > The .NET community is at a boiling point and they should really avoid a community which takes dev productivity in their own hands. Because that is the garantueed end of visual studio. sounds like .NET is almost the kind of thing I'd use then, because in a world without Visual Studio, I might not be punished for choosing to use .NET but not VS
DeathArrow 5y ago
I've always thinked of MS as filled with old fashioned managers, caring only about legacy stuff and killing any good initiative MS Research came out with. I was amazed they'd try something new like cloud. I thought they will stick to the desktop and and MS Office until someone will snatch it from their dead cold hands. But Ballmer went and Nadella came. I still think that the company has a lot of Ballmers hidden in a lot of places, waiting for the opportunity to pull the breaks if they sniff that something interesting might happen.

creato 5y ago

Has anything ever actually replaced VS? I've only ever used VS for hobby/side projects, and even 10 years ago it was leaps and bounds better than what I have to use for my professional day to day work now (code completion, debugger are the two things that I miss basically every day). The tools that I use now have these features, but they're such a joke in comparison. The code completion has no notion of "code", it's just looking for similar words.

moogly 5y ago
For many workloads (at least .NET), JetBrains Rider. For C/C++ on Windows, well, you have VS Code and also JetBrains CLion, but IMO CLion is surprisingly rougher than Rider, even though it's older. You can get stuff done though.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Good luck doing MFC, ATL, UWP, DirectX debugging with VSCode.
  - moogly 5y ago
    The "some workloads" also apply for that. I don't know about DirectX, but the other ones might be doable as long as you create the project once in VS and then (for MFC and ATL) hand edit the normally tool-generated partial classes. For UWP, you'd have to hand wrangle the XAML. You'd then invoke MSBuild for building. AFAIK there's nothing super special about MFC and ATL that would make debugging impossible, but it's true I've never tried it in VS Code.
- enhray 5y ago
  For C/C++ on Windows and Linux. CMake build support and cross-platform builds and debugging are available out of the box with Community version of VS.
- nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
  Rider is a non-starter - doesn't even have a community edition.

tester756 5y ago

>VS has no place anymore. That's exaggeration at best. VS with extensions like Roslynator make C# development really good. VS Code is nice, but I always felt like VS had significantly more reliable Intellisense than VS Code (for C#). but I wish VS (real, not 4Mac) worked on Linux.

fgonzag 5y ago
Have you tried Rider? I ditched VS as soon as I found it, but I already used intellij idea for java projects. It works perfectly on Linux.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  I did. It's ReSharper with an editor built around it. It doesn't feel better than VS.

kumarvvr 5y ago

> VS has no place anymore I use the community version. VS Code, while being extremely good, is still far behind VS. I love using VS, as a solo developer. The integration it has WRT .NET projects is amazing.

nseggs 5y ago

Desktop is dead?

oneplane 5y ago
Desktop for the bulk of generic CRUD apps is dead. But that has always been the case because that's not the main benefit of having a desktop. Same for 'what was your first computer', there is a whole generation (or maybe two of them at this point) that started out with smartphones and didn't get to the 'using a desktop' level until much later when preparation for work life required it.

bmitc 5y ago

> but desktop is dead People keep saying this, but they obviously have no idea. Desktop isn’t dead and nowhere near it. Just because web and mobile app developers think so doesn’t make it true. There are several industries in which desktop applications are a must. Any application with the needs of multiple windows automatically rules out web and mobile stacks, even if they happen to work on desktops.

brundolf 5y ago
Electron has full support for multiple windows, and you can even do it with a regular browser app if you get a little creative (windows can talk directly to other windows they create, and/or all windows could talk to the same server and receive push updates via websocket)
- bmitc 5y ago
  > Electron has full support for multiple windows Can you elaborate? The last time I looked into this (including a little now) showed that, yes, you can create multiple windows, but there are not good solutions for communicating between the windows. Electron's own documentation shows two, options between local storage and Electron's IPC mechanism. From what I've read, IPC is not good for more complex multiple window apps. So one needs to use a local network communication method. https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/faq#how-to-share-data-between-web-pages https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/faq#how-to-share-data... If this is all the case, I would hardly consider it full support.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  And old apps written in C++ and running on a Pentium 3 will beat the crap out the Electron app which will feel sluggish even on modern hardware. The only reason Electron exists is to enable Javascript developers do desktop apps without learning other languages and frameworks. Electron is not a solution for desktop development, it's a solution for lazy developers.
xvilka 5y ago
> There are several industries I would say most industries. Anything that requires creating any kind of digital content (images, videos, CAD models, electronic schematics, chip design, PCB layout, etc), most of the scientific software, all rely on the computational power and the speed of the desktop applications.

GiorgioG 5y ago

As a long-time .NET Developer, there's no way in hell you're replacing my Visual Studio with Visual Studio Code. I'll sooner switch to Rider (which I have a license for and like to use on a Mac.) VSCode is a text editor on steroids. Visual Studio is an IDE. Full stop.

foepys 5y ago
I'm in the same boat. I use VSCode for JavaScript and that is only because I'm required to by my workplace. Otherwise I'd be using Webstorm. VS is on a whole other level than VSCode when it comes to C#. I suspect that many people here haven't really used the IDE features and VS' debugger for more than simple breaking and inspecting a variable. Yes, if you have a hobby project, you can use VSCode instead of VS Community Edition just fine. But if you are dealing with concurrency errors, performance analysis, dump analysis, and very, very large projects, you can't use VsCode. VS' GUI is also a lot more flexible than VSCode's. In VS I can have a lot more information present where in VSCode I need to constantly switch windows.

ynx 5y ago

As a very longtime iOS and Linux dev turned Windows and .NET dev (with some rust on the side) - who has used VSCode, VS, and Xamarin for multiple years - no. There is a place for a featureful IDE with robustly implemented build, debug, and package management capabilities working out of the box with multiple languages and entrenched technologies. I do very much like VSC and use it all the time for anything involving text, markdown, cross-platform C++, javascript, and even rust...but Visual Studio is as much of the Windows or .NET dev's toolkit as Xcode is a part of a dev in the Apple ecosystem. VSCode is great. However, there is plenty of space for VS: it is also very strong, and has a long history of deep and extensive integration into very mature technologies. VS is still getting better year over year and while I see VSCode as competitive in some spaces, it is no contest in others. If VSCode is to replace VS, it has a very long tail of issues to address, the resolution of which would probably raise both boats anyways.

DeathArrow 5y ago
Even doing Android development with Kotlin feels nice on Visual Studio due to the integration with the emulator. What doesn't feel so nice it's writing C/C++ as intellisense does not help as much as it does for other languages.
korla 5y ago
I agree, and the competition is at this point more between VS and other full-featured IDEs like JetBrains Rider, which is my tool of choice for .Net-development. But, what I didn't know until this recent debacle, is how there is a theory that the reason the .Net-tooling in VSCode is so bad is the same reason we had this watch-debacle. There was some discussion on that in the other HN-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28968231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28968231
- vyrotek 5y ago
  I've become more convinced that VSCode doesn't implement certain features to not compete with VS. For example, support for File Nesting. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/6328 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/6328 For a while there wasn't really another way to run SQL projects outside of VS. Data Studio recently got support for that though.

jessikat 5y ago

Visual Studio does a lot more than just visual designers. The integration for .NET is fantastic. And I love Visual Studio Code for everything else :) Visual Studio still has value.

malkia 5y ago

Visual Studio's debugger alone makes it worth. It's not that it's the most powerful debugger (not like WinDbg), but it's so polished for most things I would typically do, also mixed callstacks for certain languages, Parallel Stacks and certain other features.

dt3ft 5y ago

Good luck debugging anything slightly more complex with VSCode. Desktop is dead? In your bubble perhaps. Look outside.

pjmlp 5y ago

If your world is vim and Emacs, coding like 1990's UNIX, sure. That are endless features on VS that VSCode will never get.

DeathArrow 5y ago
VS has enabled fast and lazy development for me. I don't have to memorize if a type has a method or property or what parameters a method has. I just type a dot and the IDE will tell me everything I need to know. It's good for concentrating on business logic instead of details of frameworks and libraries, but less good for interview questions if you come around people which have fixation on details.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  And isn't that good? Living the dream of Xerox PARC tooling (as close as it gets). I tend to disregard leetcode interviews anyway, unless I am on a deep need for a job without alternatives.

DeathArrow 5y ago

I still like very much the experience of developing on Visual Studio. And it's not about visual designers because I don't do Windows Forms and WPF. Intellisense and intellicode do a wonderful job with code suggestions, there are lots of tools for formatting, debugging, jumping through code, refactoring, each accessible through shortcuts. It makes the development much faster for me compared to using a text editor. And when .NET MAUI will ship, I guess we will have a visual designer for that.