[pjmlp]

WPF, Blend, hot code reloading, repl, mixed language debugging with C++/CLI, C++/CX, C++/WinRT, SharePoint, Dynamics, SQL Server SP, Architecture tooling, coverage and automatic unit tests, COM interop tooling, Azure workloads integrations, some of the examples that come to my mind.

Also, when already paid for MSDN license which includes VS, why pay for Rider?

[rvdginste]

> paid for MSDN license

I believe a lot of companies are not directly paying for MSDN licenses, but retrieve them for free through a Microsoft partnership and by fulfilling conditions to obtain silver and gold competencies. I think this is the case for a lot of smaller companies.

Microsoft however is changing their partnership conditions by focusing more and more on Azure. To be able to stay a partner with similar benefits, you basically need to generate more and more revenue on Azure for Microsoft. Something that will not be doable for a lot of smaller companies in my opinion. And this also depends a lot on the focus of the company, whether it is a pure software development shop or also a reseller of Azure services.

Besides that, .net development is no longer necessarily windows development. My current team consists of 6 people. 1 uses Linux, 2 use OS X, 3 use Windows. We use Rider, Webstorm and Datagrip. We develop .net backends that run on a Linux app service plan. The front end is in Angular. The database is postgresql.

A lot of the .net developers in our company asked to use Rider instead of the VS they get through an MSDN license. Most of them are Windows users. Some people clearly think Rider is superior to VS, myself included…

[pjmlp]

As polyglot agency, we use Java for UNIX workloads, .NET is having its Python 2 / 3 moment with .NET Framework / Core, and plenty of stuff in large enterprises will probably never migrate. It is no accident that Microsoft is doing all the blog posts about how internal teams are migrating, or eventually started coming up with porting tools, which in the beggining they refused to provide (like in WCF's case). [0]

And even so, plenty of Microsoft products like Dynamics, SharePoint, VS, SQL Server CLR, are yet to make the transition to .NET Core.

So when doing UNIX workloads, we rather use languages what were created and grew up on that environment.

Visual Studio for .NET, Eclipse for Java, VSCode for node/devops (any of them for C++ workloads if needed as well), are basically how things go over here.

[0] - To be fair, Java is also having its Python 2 / 3 moment with anything beyond Java 8. Finally got to deploy Java 11 LTS into production (hurray!).

[rvdginste]

> plenty of stuff in large enterprises will probably never migrate

I think you are right. I worked, and still assist, on a couple of big projects that are built on .NET Framework. I recently pushed to have those upgraded to the latest .NET Framework version, latest version of their libraries, and have the csproj-files upgraded to the new style. Those projects are all WCF, they use NetTcp, they use transaction flow over WCF, some use WCF-msmq. There is a big dependency on distributed transactions over service boundaries, sql server and queues, and on WCF. It would be a major effort to rewrite those to run on .NET Core without distributed transactions and over HTTP APIs.

Those systems have been running just fine for over 10 years, are deployed on-prem and are only used internally on the company network. As long as .NET Framework is supported, there is no value in a rewrite to .NET Core for the business.

In the company where I work, we actually do C# on .NET Framework (maintenance, support) + Core (all new projects), Java, Delphi, and Angular + TypeScript for frontends. We use a lot of the JetBrains tools: IntelliJ IDEA for Java development, WebStorm for frontend development. We used to use Visual Studio + ReSharper for C# development and since Rider came out, a lot of people moved to that.

[kaba0]

That’s what you get if something as basic as debugging is not open-source for your platform.

[whoisthemachine]

Rider has a great WPF editor (again, I would say it often surpasses VS in terms of code completion), and is capable of hot code reloading (for server code - it doesn't work with WPF AFAIK).

I'm also not sure what you mean by "REPL" as I tend to think of that as a language feature, not an IDE feature (most read-eval-print-loops are done through a terminal, which Rider has).

Rider also has coverage and automatic unit tests (and it's sibling product Resharper had it for years before Visual Studio added it).

"Architecture tooling" could be a quite broad category, but as far as where I've used Jetbrains products in this sense, they can automatically build class diagrams and the like from your code, and even export them to PlantUML if you want.

Jetbrains also offers an IDE that can handle C++ just fine - https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/. I don't know how well it handles WinRT, but I'll admit I've never had the need to develop or deploy a WinRT application. I do know that they've started building in MAUI integration [2].

I'll confess I don't use Dynamics, or know what SQL Server SP is, but Rider has great Database tooling built in. I've never had a problem connecting to MS SQL Server, SQLite, Postgres, or MySQL databases with it.

> Also, when already paid for MSDN license which includes VS, why pay for Rider?

I guess this question is aggressively asking why someone would choose Rider if they already have Visual Studio Enterprise, and beyond it's great tooling, the main benefits for me are the great code completion, the snappiness of the UI (you can use the editor before it has loaded the AST), and how rare crashes are with it (and it has seemingly gotten even rarer in the last few months, I can't remember it crashing). Beyond that, if you have to choose between the two, an Enterprise MSDN license is $6k/yr [0], and a commercial Rider license + the other Jetbrains C# tools is $470/yr [1]. The former is usually a difficult question with your manager and/or purchasing, while the latter hardly raises an eyebrow.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/visual-studio-enterprise-s...

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/buy/#commercial

[2] https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2022/08/02/rider-2022-2-re...

[easton]

> The former is usually a difficult question with your manager and/or purchasing, while the latter hardly raises an eyebrow.

The one thing is that everyone on your team probably uses Visual Studio or has a license if you’re a .NET shop, that may not be true of Rider or ReSharper. Your manager is already convinced of the need for VS. (I just bought my own JetBrains Toolbox because I had a coupon, but my company will pay for ReSharper if we want it)

[pjmlp]

Instead of VS, buy two IDEs on top of MSDN, great.

SQL Server Stored Procedures, which can be written in .NET, as SQL Server hosts the CLR. This includes the whole debugging and deployment stuff.

Architecture tooling means Enterprise Architect level not basic PlantUML stuff.

MSDN licenses are always part of Windows development workshops, the only question is choosing between professional or enterprise.

So anything JetBrains is always extra.

[yakubin]

I don’t know about .NET, but REPLs don’t need to have anything to do with terminals. One example of a REPL are Swift Playgrounds in XCode. Jupyter Notebooks are also a kind of REPL.

[whoisthemachine]

Certainly, and there are numerous REPL environments (LINQ Pad springs to mind), including via the console.