In the .Net world there is not much choice when it comes to IDE, the most popular is “Visual Studio” developed by Microsoft and “Rider” developed by JetBrains (Resharper Creators). When I watching YT or courses, I saw trend, software engineers less often used Visual Studio and more often a Rider. Earlier I heard that Rider was lacking in functionality, but a few years have passed so I decided to take a look at this IDE.
What bothers me the most about Visual Studio?
Visual Studio itself is a great tool, but as a programmer, I care about productivity, so I have Resharper plugin installed (it adds new possibilities to Visual Studio, facilitates refactoring, code cleanup and much more).
The problem is that when we install Resharper to Visual Studio. The IDE is starting to work very slowly, I even had a problem with switching to a different card sometimes.
I mainly work in systems with a modular monolith architecture, which is associated with a large codebase in a single solution and many sub-projects (about 100 in my case). Solution loading took a long time, the multitude of sub-projects further compounded the performance problems. Performance Issues The Visual Studio maybe connected with program architecture itself. It is 32 bit.
The last small disadvantage in my opinion is that the versions for Visual Studio for other platforms differ, e.g. the version for MacOS is very limited and does not resemble the version on the Windows platform.
How is Rider doing?
Rider, in opposite to Visual Studio, is 64 bit, Resharper is natively built into the IDE, so my performance problems are solved. It works very smoothly with no stuttering. The IDE is fully cross platform, works and looks exactly the same on Windows, Linux, MacOS.
Wait, does Rider have only pluses?
Unfortunately no, Visual Studio has been in development over the years and therefore has more plugins. Visual Studio supports many more technologies, this is especially important when working in a legacy project, e.g. in Rider you will not make a Report for SSRS.Visual Studio is very advanced, it has many specialized tools that Rider lacks. However, I haven’t used most of them anyway, and so do most programmers.
How was the transition to Rider from Visual Studio?
I started using the Rider for the first time 6 months ago. At the start, he asked me to choose keyboard shortcuts. I chose the shortcuts from Visual Studio to quickly get into the new tool. After a few days I saw no turning back, working with my projects became more productive, I was not distracted by the constant freeze of the program. Working with Rider where the rest of the team was working in Visual Studio, I never had a situation where I couldn’t do something in Rider that the rest of the team could do in Visual Studio. Which shows that Rider is a good alternative to Visual Studio.
Pricing
You can choose Rider or Visual Studio based on economic reasons.
| Rider | Visual Studio Professional | Visual Studio Professional + Resharper | Visual Studio Enterprise | Visual Studio Enterprise + Resharper | |
| per month | 16.5 | 45 | 250 | ||
| per year | 164 | 540 | 893 | 3000 | 3353 |
- Pricing in USD.
- Resharper cost 353 USD per year.
