this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Is Rider that great? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'm partly just posting this to get some more content going here...

...but I've been using Rider for the past year or so, and I'm not sure I can say it's better than Visual Studio. I find anytime it comes up it's all praise for Rider (including the debugger, which i find to be crap)

The Pros:

--IdeaVim is better than VsVim

--Feels a bit snappier

--The find in files pops up in a dialog box with "display as you type"

Cons:

--I really don't like the debugger layout. It's not customizable at all and I find I'm going back and forth between tabs all the time

--The debugger also doesn't have a second watch window, which blows my mind. (I often want to compare the state of 2 variables side by side, which is a huge pain in Rider)

--It has a bad bug where sometimes it won't recompile my changes, so I have adopted the workflow of always deliberately building before debugging, which is annoying.

--Doesn't work with WinForms

I just always see comments about how much better Rider is. It has some advantages, but it has some massive flaws IMO too. I'm not sure what I'm going to use going forward. Right now I'm developing in rider and debugging in VS.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I absolutely swear by Rider, but reading your comments perhaps there's a lot to Visual Studio's debugger that I've never taken advantage of.

I find Visual Studio to be terribly slow and bloated. I was also an avid Resharper user, so rider was a much better fit for me. I'm fortunate that I don't work with WPF anymore and I've never touched WinForms so those missing features don't bother me.

Using Rider has also meant I can fully move over to Linux which has vastly simplified things for me. No longer am I having to fight to get bash, docker etc to work on Windows. So my development environment now much more closely resembles the server environment.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I think the latest versions of Visual Studio have gotten a bit better regarding performance. I initially switched because of performance issues with a particular solution (which is now fixed). I still find it slower than Rider though.

Regarding the debugger, I do wonder if I'm misusing the Rider debugger, because I've seen lots of comments saying that it's way better than the VS one.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Which latest version of VS are you referring to? I only switched to Rider a year ago so I was already accustomed to VS 2022 which introduced 64bit extensions and I was still having issue with poor performance.

I will say that VS has a much more versatile UI. Rider sucks at multi-monitor support. VS has always supported docking tool windows together on another screen but Rider just can't do that. The devs recently introduced being able to have a second editor window on a separate screen with docked tool windows so closed the issue on their tracker but it's such a clumsy implementation compared to VS.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm on the latest version of the preview (17.7). I think most of the performance enhancements were in the past 6 months, or even less. If you do a search for "visual studio 17.x performance" for x =4 to 6, you should get some devblogs posts about various performance improvements (some drastic).

My guess is that the VS team is prioritizing performance where they were previously putting out fires due to the switch to 64 bit.

I'm on triple monitors and I agree with the lacking multi monitor support.

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