[mattferderer]

As a paying subscriber I love this move for the .NET community.

As a .NET dev for many years, I've noticed there have been periods of time where either Visual Studio or Rider was far better than the other. Currently, Rider is much better.

Hopefully this encourages more people to try out C# & F#. Both fantastic languages.

- Edit - Looks like Webstorm (JS/TS editor) is also free now.

[CharlieDigital]

I had a Rider license for a while but just let it lapse.

I've found myself totally satisfied with just VS Code on macOS (it's come a really long way).

I'm glad that this move will possibly make .NET more accessible, but I think VSC is in a really good place with C# at the moment and shouldn't be overlooked.

[mattferderer]

VS Code is really good at certain things but it struggles on larger projects & doesn't have near the advanced features.

It's a very good choice though for a lot of projects. It's also a great way to try out C#. It has some amazing extensions for certain tasks too.

[CharlieDigital]

VSC feels pretty capable in my books.

We have a mono-repo with 100k lines of C# in 8 projects, 40k lines of Vue SFCs in 2 workspaces, 39k lines of TypeScript, 23k lines of Astro. No issues at all running it on a 2021 14" MacBook Pro with only 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD while also running multiple Docker containers for Postgres, Neo4j, Memcached, and LocalStack.

My take is that folks should not underestimate VSC; there are certainly things that Rider does better, but VSC is totally viable for modern .NET backend work.

[withinboredom]

100k loc is not big. That’s a small-medium sized project.

[CharlieDigital]

It's not an all C# project; C# only comprises the backend.

All in, the mono-repo is somewhere over 250k SLOC with mixed languages (Vue SFC, TS, Astro, JSX, shell). So when VSC is loaded, it's not only handling C#, but also everything else.

Point is that VSC is more than capable of handling production scale, multi-language workspaces even on 2021 hardware with only 16GB of RAM.

[nightski]

It's not that VS Code can't load a large project, that is table stakes. It's that the tools it provides to work with those large code bases are like fisher price versions of the Jetbrains equivalents. If one take their tools seriously, and uses them to the maximum extent possible to increase productivity, reliability, and robustness of code then there is just no comparison between the two.

Don't get me wrong, I still use VS code for all front-end development and other ecosystems (such as Rust). But when it specifically comes to C#/.NET there is no substitute to Rider in my opinion.

[elAhmo]

100k lines of code is definitely big and by no means a small project.

[sigseg1v]

Just my experience, but at multiple companies, which are in the 50-70 employees range, their C# codebases were over 1 million LOC and I didn't get the feeling that they were exceptionally large or doing anything significantly different. I would put 1 million LOC as "medium enterprise . NET" which would place 100k in the small or possibly medium sized if there was significantly more LOC in another language that is part of the project that you aren't counting (eg. different web front-end).

[LandR]

For enterprise .NET that's definitely small.

I've commonly seen enterprise .NET projects that are in the millions of LOC. And one that was over 10 million.

[no_wizard]

I’d say medium, edging toward small, especially for the .NET community

[yungporko]

my experience last time i tried it on a decent sized blazor project (about a year ago) was countless false errors and broken syntax highlighting to the point that i had to ignore everything and treat it like a dumb text editor like notepad if i wanted to actually get anything done instead of chasing shadows

[ohnoesjmr]

I work on a almost 20 year old C# monolith, with 1000+ projects per solution. It doesn't even load in VS or VSC. Rider needs 16GB of ram, but manages to open it. I try to never close the IDE, as it takes 30mins to open.

[memsom]

The C# dev kit plug-in improved VSCode a lot, but it is still under the same licensing as Visual Studio Community. So, you need an account to use it, and it is pretty restricted for commercial use without an MSDN/Visual Studio subscription. If you are using it commercially outside of the terms of the Community license, you are probably using it illegally.

Not using the C# Dev kit, the old OmniSharp stuff is miles behind Rider. It is really poor in comparison.

I've been a previous subscriber, but I let my license lapse after this announcement. I don;t really need to be on the "latest and greatest" train, and I can get my company to buy me a license if a new feature comes in that I need commercially. I have got a perpetual fallback Rider license, but I will also use the non-commercial licenses to do any OS work in my spare time going forward (which is mostly on Mac and why I had a paid licence initially anyway.)

[wokwokwok]

What fan boy nonsense is this? The VSC support for c# is miles behind visual studio. Rider isn’t as good either, but it’s certainly better than VSC.

Are you heavily using typescript with a bit of c# or a really tiny code base?

This comment is incomprehensible to me. Do you never refactor code? There are a lot of sophisticated things you can’t do with VSC.

It’s a great editor; but not for c#.

The benefit of using it is absolutely zero unless you’re heavily leaning into the other parts of the VSC ecosystem (like a big typescript code base).

> it’s come a really long way

So has visual studio; and it started off better, and still is.

Rider is too.

I’m happy to die on this hill; if you’re using VSC for c#, it’s because it’s free, and perhaps good enough for some things; not because it’s better than the alternatives.

Even if you’re stuck on a Mac, I can't believe you honestly find VSC an acceptable editor after using rider.

All I can say is I certainly do not agree.

[andybak]

If Visual Studio has better support for C# than Rider, why does Resharper exist?

Not trying to start an argument - I've never used Visual Studio with C# (I was a PyCharm user when I started learning Unity so Rider was an obvious choice) but I always assumed that Rider was better - because it was managing to survive as a paid product so it must have had an edge.

[recursive]

> why does Resharper exist?

I've wondered this for a long time. Last time I looked at the feature list, it seemed to consist mostly of stuff that was already in VS. The rest was stuff for which I could not fathom any practical utility.

Some people love it. When I've asked them why, they mention features that are in VS, but they just didn't know it.

So if you figure it out, let me know.

[yungporko]

i like resharper just because it has some nice suggestions for cleaning up code that visual studio doesn't have. i probably wouldn't pay for it on its own, but it comes with the package i have for rider so i do use it.

[tester756]

>If Visual Studio has better support for C# than Rider, why does Resharper exist?

Back in the days there werent free extensions like Roslynator

[tokinonagare]

> If Visual Studio has better support for C# than Rider, why does Resharper exist?

I'm pretty sure Resharper existed before Rider. Also, the existence and utility of the plugin is a mystery to me. I tried it once and it adds so many attention disturbing behavior especially in the bottom bar that I disabled it immediately. None of its feature was every needed in the company I work, and the Rider crowd there don't seems to produce better code than those using VS.

[andybak]

> the Rider crowd there don't seems to produce better code than those using VS.

I'm not sure that's a valid way to evaluate the utility of an IDE!

[CharlieDigital]

100k lines of C# in 8 projects, 40k lines of Vue SFCs in 2 workspaces, 39k lines of TypeScript in a monorepo.

I use it every day on a 2021 M1 MacBook Pro 16GB/512GB.

Works completely fine to the extent that I just let my Rider license lapse.

[wokwokwok]

Well, perhaps anyone who’s thinking about it can do their own research in /r/vscode and read about how much people love c# dev kit.

TLDR; it’s not just me.

I’m glad you like it and have found a workflow that works for you. I think you’re crazy.

[CharlieDigital]

My point isn't that "people shouldn't use Rider"; I myself had a Rider license and it's a GREAT IDE.

My point is "you shouldn't skip C# because you think you need a license for an IDE to be use it professionally".

Devs who are already using VSC for doing front-end and want to try full stack can absolutely do heavy lifting in VSC.

I let my license lapse not because Rider wasn't a great IDE, but because VSC is fully capable for backend and fullstack work.

    > I think you're crazy

I'll take that as a compliment :D. Even back in 2021 when I was invited to present at the Azure Serverless Conf[0], I chose VSC for my session to showcase that anyone could start developing .NET without expensive licenses (a common myth).

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/azure-serverless-con...

[VMtest]

good engineers choose their own tools

otherwise, they are bad engineers, period

keep your strong opinions to yourself and don't be judgemental

you can, however, criticize their workdone instead of their tools

[WolfeReader]

"What fan boy nonsense is this?" Good way to start a VS fanboy post.

Personally, I have written APIs in C# from scratch to production entirely in VSC; your assertion that "It’s a great editor; but not for c#" is literally false in my lived experience.

Rider is also good. And since I run Linux, VS took itself out of my consideration entirely.

[MangoCoffee]

I use Visual Studio from work and personally subscribe to JetBrains.

For those developing commercial software on a budget, Visual Studio Code is an excellent option.

Although it lacks some features of JetBrains and Microsoft tools, pairing the .NET CLI with VS Code can still deliver impressive results.

if you can afford $10 monthly, integrating GitHub Copilot with VS Code can elevate it to a fancy, lightweight IDE

[neonsunset]

That's my exact workflow nowadays. The best text editing experience with GH copilot and lowest battery footprint makes using a VSC a no-brainer. It's especially nice since it also happens to be the choice for Rust, so I experience very little friction, not having to switch an editor and using capable CLI of .NET and Cargo.

For advanced scenarios Rider still rules, and this change is a very welcome one. I hope it will help with promoting .NET as the first choice where teams historically picked Go (which is worse).

[CharlieDigital]

    >  I hope it will help with promoting .NET as the first choice where teams historically picked Go (which is worse)

Curious in what ways specifically you think Go is worse than .NET and what contexts?

[neonsunset]

With discipline, it is both more expressive by having a better and more powerful type system, and faster by allowing much finer control over code execution, data layout and allocations as well as offering actual GC tuning options. .NET's compiler is much more capable too, and the rate of improvement is not slowing down. It also has much richer package for writing line-of-business applications productively. The main advantage of Go used to be and still is "culture". But once you apply such minimalism mentality to C#, it gives a much better end result.

[tester756]

Why battery footprint would be even relevant for day2day?

Do you develop outside?

[wiseowise]

> - Edit - Looks like Webstorm (JS/TS editor) is also free now.

Wow. VSCode finally got them, it seems.

[no_wizard]

I think JetBrains is struggling a bit to land their next gen editor Fleet.

It came out swinging with a very early open beta and seemed to market itself as the coming replacement for all their IDEs, because all their IDEs would become plugins of sorts under the Fleet architecture, but have a dramatically easier API to develop against for plugin authors, be snappier, load quickly be less memory intensive etc.

From the looks of it now they changed the wording and messaging around Fleet as a longer term project and they seem to have gone back to mainly doubling down on pushing their bespoke IDEs, which ain’t a bad thing

[NoahKAndrews]

Did that ever imply Fleet was going to be finished in the near-term?

[innocenat]

Almost (or maybe even all) of what WebStorm does, you can do it in Rider or RustRover (which is also free). So it make no sense to not also make WebStorm free.

[pjmlp]

I also expect this to put pressure on C# DevKit team, right now its purpose is to only be good enough to drive people into Windows/VS, eventually.

Rider is the only comparable DX to VS outside Windows.

[aithrowawaycomm]

Sadly I cancelled my Rider subscription this year because AFAICT they've stopped supporting F#, it hasn't worked well for at least two years and has only gotten worse: crawling performance, lots of erroneous red squiggles, no IDE support for later .NET features. Maybe Visual Studio is better than it was a few years ago, but these days I just use emacs, and the MS F# team seems to prefer VSC over VS.

[neonsunset]

This is complete nonsense. Rider has first-class F# support and a sizable faction of employees internally who love and use it.

[aithrowawaycomm]

Do you actually use Rider for F#, or are you just repeating old wisdom? Your comment is rude and unhelpful, because I gave my direct experience as to why I stopped using Rider, and you responded with an empty platitude. Yet you did so in the most thoughtless, dismissive way imaginable, as if I was simply lying.

Rider was first-class a few years ago but has gone badly downhill, and it does not support F# on newer versions of .NET - or at least it didn't in June 2024 when I cancelled my subscription.

[g8oz]

RustRover (Rust ide) is also now free for non commercial use

[LeFantome]

Oh. Very cool. Thanks for the heads up.

[nazka]

Webstorm is free but only for noncommercial use.

On a side note, if you code in JS/TS and you are a full-stack or backend dev, use PhpStorm instead. It is essentially Webstorm (+ PHP) + all the database tools. Those tools are one of the big reasons I bought their software with my own money.

[AmazingTurtle]

both webstorm and rider is free now? why am I still paying. been a customer for years but all I used was rider and webstorm.

[progforlyfe]

free for non-commercial use.

[spuz]

What is the difference between Rider and Resharper?

[memsom]

Rider is an IDE that replaces Visual Studio and includes the resharper engine built in.

Resharper is a plug-in that is hosted by Visual Studio.

Resharper in Rider is pretty much the same as in VS, but in Rider it is native and always feels snappier to me.

[eterm]

VS + Resharper is painfully slow. Rider is refreshingly fast.

[jonathanlydall]

I recently upgraded my laptop and finally VS with Resharper is blazingly fast.

My old laptop was a an 8th gen i7 with SSD and 32GB of RAM.

New one is a 13th gen i7 with an NVMe and 64GB of RAM.

I suspect the biggest difference is the NVMe. It probably also helps that I’m using Windows 11’s Dev Drive where I’ve enabled all the policies mentioned in their docs to minimise the impact of Windows Defender.

And finally, so much RAM means Windows gets to keep a lot of my working files cached.

[adra]

Certainly any poorly configure av scanners will turn even the best computers into a heaping pile of garbage. A lot of people abandoned windows development not because the platforms were bad, but because corporate av policy was always scan everything and the performance became unbelievably slow. Now, it's so extreme, you can't enev get a windows (or shocked, Linux) requisition in so many dev shops.