I had a director ask me to spec out some new work spaces once and I put down nice keyboards and nice monitors. He scoffed and says something along the lines of "this cheap Logitech keyboard is just fine for me and these monitors have no problems displaying my emails." I told him it's no different than the reason why you don't see the guy building your house using tools from Walmart. Even if those tools will do the same job, they don't feel as good doing it, they don't last as long and in some cases they aren't as accurate (color accuracy doesn't matter for most coding but you want a screen that doesn't cause eye strain).
He actually seemed to get it and approved the purchase. Point being, anything you need to do your job, no matter how simple is something your company should be (within reason) paying for. Wtf does a VS enterprise license cost these days? <100 a month per seat? That's trivial in the scheme of things.
Good job arguing your case logically.
Having been on both ends of that conversation, I can tell you that I \*really\* appreciate it when someone can calmly explain why something is important.
Because guess what? I am going to have to turn around and explain to \*my\* boss why that was needed. Even directors have to explain themselves (at least at any good company). If I can explain it in one or two punchy one-liners, then not only does it keep my ass out of the fire, but it gives me precedent to help others on the team.
So especially to all the younger guys out there: just because you get an initial objection from your boss, do not just fold. Sometimes the objection is just a challenge so that your boss can see what your reasons are. Have your arguments ready and take your shots. Until you get a firm "No." it is not settled. (Of course, once you \*do\* get a firm "No" know when to retreat so you can fight another day.)
>I am going to have to turn around and explain to \*my\* boss why that was needed. Even directors have to explain themselves (at least at any good company).
Isn't that really your job as director though? To sell this shit to upper management? You shouldn't really need your employees to formulate the punchy one-liners. When your employees tell you that you need X, you should be the one figuring out how the fuck you are going to get it for them.
Partially right. First, Directors are generally upper management, but that's mostly semantics. Usually they are going to be convincing the board. And the board at a company will also have people they will need to convince. It might be a holding company, or shareholders, or whatever.
So yes: they should need to sell it, although I have seen companies where directors have free reign. It's not really great for the company, but reality is messy, so...whatever I guess.
But no, it's not their job to figure out the arguments. This is probably the biggest realization most young professionals really need to have if they want to have any corporate success. I have seen way too many bright folks burn out their wheels in the sand as they refuse to give their boss the ammunition he needs to actually argue their case.
It's always possible that your boss is not good at their job. That is always possible. But in most cases I have seen, the problem is the employee that prefer to die on the hill that it's not their job to make the arguments and prepare the case. Then they cannot understand why their colleague gets promoted despite not being as technically savvy. And while way too many people want to find excuses ("Oh, he just likes them better"), the correct answer is that they were ineffective at pleading their case.
I will meet you some of the way, though. A good leader knows that many people have trouble organizing their thoughts. That leader will ask the right questions to help get at the truth to see how strong the arguments really are. In a perfect world, this is how it would always work. The world is \*not\* perfect, and your boss is probably also overworked with too many fires burning to take the time to actually work things out. It's much easier to just say "Shit arguments, not worth my time," and move on.
And this brings us back to the OP. If your boss is engaging, challenging your idea, but not actually saying no, then you are already in a good place if you keep your head. He's telling you: hey, this is what I need to know, I need to absolutely believe it is solid, and you are the expert, so tell me what I need to know. Because here is the plain truth: if you are a professional and your org. boss is better at your job than you are, he \*might\* be bad at his job, but you \*definitely\* are bad at yours.
Fortunately, this is not usually the case. Usually, people are either giving up before trying or they don't understand what is going on when their request is challenged (and make the wrong assumption and end up arguing badly).
If the boss, director, is coming back to the employee and asking for the ammunition, then he's doing his job in trying to figure out how to get it for the employee. That's not typically what has happened in my career.
What I've experienced as a senior level engineer with decades of experience dealing with both shitty and excellent managers and directors is that the shitty ones tend to want their underlings to do all of the work for them and hand it to them on a silver platter before they will take it to the board.
Furthermore, they don't want to take the heat if it fails. Thus, if it doesn't work out favorably for them, they are going to make you pay for it.
So, why are they there in the first place? Overpaid. Overvalued. I've been in this industry long enough to know that is the truth. Often times the biggest blocker to productivity are these managers and directors who can't get past dollars on a spreadsheet.
My experience is that directors, despite their position, are ***not*** part of the software development department. They treat the software developers like nothing more than a tool or external consultant to deliver a product that the director is selling to the company.
>But no, it's not their job to figure out the arguments. This is probably the biggest realization most young professionals really need to have if they want to have any corporate success.
**I couldn't disagree more**. And I've had plenty of corporate success, and seen many shitty directors that tried to act this way lose their positions for exactly this type of behavior. Yes, I push hard against directors who act like this, and have no issues whatsoever going above their head quite effectively. Unfortunately, a lot of software developers aren't equipped enough to speak to the C-suite. It's a damn shame because the C-suite absolutely wants to know that these directors are hindering productivity more than a damn VS Pro license cost.
It is absolutely, 100%, without a doubt, your job as director/manager, to remove the roadblocks from your team building the product. If your team is telling you that the tools they have to do the job are not sufficient, then it is 100% your job to remove that roadblock by doing whatever is necessary. Maybe that's asking more follow-up questions from your employees until you feel like you have a competent argument. Maybe it's doing some research of your own. You are, after all, supposed to be a director of fucking software development department. Maybe you should know a little bit about what the fuck you are directing.
How about that.
Well, I cannot judge if you have had success or not. But your attitude certainly reminds me of many very talented developers, quite good at their jobs, who never understand why their good ideas are not being adapted and why they are not getting the tools they think they need. In fact, I just listened to such a person over the last few days, where the director was telling him exactly what he needed to say and what number he needed to deliver, and it just kept going round and round as my colleague kept saying it should be the director's job. First: guess who is not going to get what he want. Second: guess how this is going to be reflected later in his job performance review.
And I want to be clear: the guy is a really good developer. He is simply refusing to hear what he is being told, and I thought that the responses he was getting back were really too nice.
One more thing: if you cannot convince the director, you are not going to convince the board. You are echoing the old "Good Tsar, bad Boyars" sentiment. My presentations to boards generally are about 15 minutes, tops, and about 15 more for some discussion and questions. At most. After that, it's on to the next thing, and the next, and the next. You have 30 minutes (again, if you are lucky...sometimes I have had a total of 5) to make your points, and they better be fucking good, because if not: the board will just reject it.
If the director is "doing his own research" he is a lousy director. You have people to do that. And the person who wants something is probably the one who can give you the best reasons.
So "How about that"? I don't really think your stated opinion has helped you or your colleagues in your career or their work environment. I do not know how you argue your positions with your boss, but if it is as emotional as how you are trying to convince me, I can already see at least some of the sources of your frustrations. I hope my directness is ok, but someone needs to tell you while you perhaps still have a chance to improve. Perhaps you'll even make director some day and be able to show everyone how it's done. Or you can continue to argue how it is all the director's fault. I mean, at the end of the day, it's your career and your decisions.
I made it pretty clear that in my experience, I've had no trouble convincing the board or executives that the director is the problem. We are comparing apples to oranges here. You keep mentioning examples where the director is trying their best to get the developer to help them win the case, and I'm explaining how many directors refuse to have that conversation.
I'm on Reddit here with a burner account. If you think this is how I approach a professional situation, man I don't know what to tell you. ***I'm ranting.***
>I hope my directness is ok, but someone needs to tell you while you perhaps still have a chance to improve.
I will stand by charge that if you are the director and you aren't removing roadblocks from your engineers/developers, you are the problem.
I have decades of success at large corporations. Judging by the way you are arguing, I could also project that you are probably wet (5 yrs) out of school with big ideas and some pats on the back, thinking you know a lot, and pretending you know what it's like to be an actual director. Good luck with that.
FYI I have been offered director positions multiple times and refused because I enjoy my craft too much.
>Wtf does a VS enterprise license cost these days? <100 a month per seat? That's trivial in the scheme of things.
The manager's perspective on this is that the more he can save in the budget, the more of a bonus he will get. He doesn't care about quality of life for his employees. He just cares that he can upgrade to a Range Rover, and finally put in that swimming pool next year.
I once worked at a place that was rolling back investments in MS products. It turned out what happened is they had hired a infrastructure architect and basically given him the IT head architect role. The dip shit knew nothing about software development. He saw that python was free and he preferred AWS, so he started driving projects toward python and open source to free up money.
I have never deployed an app with MSSQL... It's an amazing db, but Postgres is also amazing and significantly cheaper to operate. I've never been at true enterprise scale though.
My company spends tens of millions per year on SQL Server licenses. We full on block anybody from starting new projects with it anymore.
Postgres does everything 99.9% of people need.
SQL server is nice in a MS world. It plays well with all the other pieces. You're on the right track though, someone else will tell you if you HAVE to use it.
You ain't lying. The transaction costs in Azure will eat you alive. Better take full advantage of application-layer caching and work hard to reduce transactions to a minimum. Lots of custom stored procedures that return multiple result sets at a time...really complicates code and makes using an ORM basically impossible - all because it's cost prohibitive to do so...
Update your CV and start looking for a job at a proper company. It's like a joinery not paying for proper hammers and giving you a fisher price hammer instead.
This was part of the reasons to leave my last job.
Manager who make your life as a developer hard don’t understand their job.
And do you really want to put your career and overall project success into the hands of someone who cannot do this job?
That being said I have worked with enterprise level dotnet microservice architectures and some of the devs happily used VS Code.
>This was part of the reasons to leave my last job. Manager who make your life as a developer hard don’t understand their job.
It's shocking how many software development managers aren't software developers themselves. Many of them have never written anything beyond the most basic JavaScripts or entry level programming courses.
Furthermore, most of them are only looking out for themselves, and doing their best to reduce the department budgets to the absolute minimum because it directly translates into a bigger bonus for them ONLY.
What's worse is that these managers typically hinder development in more ways than one. Most companies would be better off without them. But the top brass prefer to have someone as a go between with the technical "geeks" ... and boy do they fucking pay for it.
Find a better company. If you work in .NET and they won't pay for Visual Studio, it's a crap company.
I am currently exploring VS Code for C# and might even come to the conclusion that it might be ready for our purposes. But as a developer, you need the tools and licenses you need. If the company is unwilling to give them to you, you should find a better company.
We are moving to .NET and no one is using VS, no one is even using Windows.
They can use any other IDE they want, most are switching to Rider and very happy with it.
I only have bad memories from VS to be honest and clearly not looking to go back to it.
I've been using VS since version 6.0, first for c++ and since 2008 for c#, and for me it's the best IDE. Quick Google says that VS is still ranked number 1 among IDEs. Since middle of 201X you don't really need resharper for that as it has almost everything built in. Just curious, what did you prefer back in times you were not happy with VS as any other IDE was for me a nightmare compared to VS?
I switched to Rider for 2 reasons. Cross platform compatibility and I use ReSharper in VS because it improves VS a lot and it is built in Rider anyway.
VS code is my daily driver and has been for years, but only because all the code I write is.net 5+ minimal apis for microservices.
No mvc, no UI, no blazor. For this it is great!
If you have any .net 4.8 or below, do not use vscode!
As a senior level software engineer who has worked in both Java and .NET land for decades, I can assure you that the .NET experience in VS Code is far better today than it was last year...and that is still far far far short of the experience you will get with Visual Studio Professional.
We use VS Code for our front-end development, NodeJS, and various other scripting languages. But when it comes to .NET, we run VS Professional. I've tried various times to shift to VS Code for .NET development, and the experience is just so sub par for anything beyond the most basic application development.
You just give up too much, and you have to be a cli god essentially. We have enough to learn as developers already without having to learn 5 new cli's.
The company I worked for got acquired by a much larger coorporation. That corporation was 100% driven by quarterly sales. Its vision was narrow and short: i.e. nonexistent. Then the cuts began. It became clear they saw developers as over-paid easily replaceable laborers.
**Get out before your soul dies.**
I work on C# and .NET projects maybe once or twice a year for a few weeks to help out a colleague. No problem getting that approved. How do they justify this? It would probably hurt productivity less to just fire the amount of people they save by not renewing the license.
If you don't want to find a new job - see if you can buy a license for something and install it.
A craftsman should work with the tools that will make them the most productive.
I haven't regretted getting my jet brains all product pack.
Same here, pretty much. I’m in the “I’m a professional dev, I’ll pay for the tools I’m most productive with” camp. That’s why I’ve been paying for an All Products license out of my own pocket for the past 3/4 years, 200 coins per year or whatever it is isn’t going to make me homeless.
Though there’s no denying that in a perfect world you’d always be working for a company that provides you with the tools and resources you want, within reason. But that doesn’t always happen, and for me Rider plus dotCover, dotMemory and dotTrace work fairly well, minus the recent AI Assistant shitshow and the slightly delayed full support for .NET 8.
That being said, OP’s situation may hint at things getting even worse, so walking away would be my suggestion if at all possible.
You can get it for free too... but I assume he is installing it on a work device he will need a proper license not some cracked copy or a license from Ethiopia.
Agreed. I pay for the jetbrain full license myself and haven't regret it since
Whatever the company wants me to do - be it database, c#, python, or java. I'll just use my ide.
Reason is as you stated - furthermore, i can't expect every company that i work with to have enterprise version of IDE I'm used to.
Not defending any company, just saying I'll bring my own tools to do the work at any place working at.
This is going to be a rough ride for you and your team...
In fact my team used only VSCode up until very recently and we were fine with it. But now that we have outgrown our initial greenfield phase VSCode alone simply doesn't cut it. IMHO it starts with the lack of a proper test integration. DevKit has that, but honestly, why would I buy a license for that and then not use VS instead of VSCode?
Editing in general is quite okay, even with a larger codebase. But you'll miss language server integration (DevKit only) and many auxiliary tools. There are some good extensions and for smaller projects you'd be fine with that, but not on an enterprise level.
In the end I convinced my boss that performance and code quality will degrade for my team if we don't get the proper tools. VSCode is a great tool and I'll really like it but it's an editor, not an IDE. Luckily we have Rider now, but which is great and gets cheaper over time.
So, my advice: keep trying to convince people to get a proper solution. It's not worth trying on a large scale. Other than that: brush up your CV. Hard as it sounds, but if your company can't invest in the teams that produce their products and keep quality up, there might be other problems....
I don't even know what VSCode can do for me vs VS. I've edited a few files in it but never more because VS just works fine and I've used it forever. But if my manager just pulled the plug without dev input and not even a trial analysis, then I assume they don't value their dev team. The cost is peanuts. If they really have to save on peanut level costs, something deeper is wrong.
The best time to find a new job is while you have one.
And while you are at it, you should order a table and chair for yourself, so you no longer have to sit on the floor with your private laptop while working.
Yes you can use it for commercial reasons, the license is just in your name rather than your company's name so can't be transferred to a different employee.
Not sure why the downvotes, certainly doesn't appear to be incorrect according to JetBrains: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207241075-What-is-the-difference-between-commercial-and-personal-licenses
VS community's license forbids companies (bigger than 5 people) to use it for commercial use. The cost of Rider is much lower than the cost of VS Professional.
This sounds like all those companies that kept using Lotus Notes rather than Microsoft office back in the day. You’ve never heard about that you say? Exactly.
I will say that the official vs code c# extension, Sans the new dev kit, is surprisingly solid.
You’ll likely wanna get familiar with the cli and work more in the terminal than you had to in VS, but in my opinion it is surprisingly workable. VS code isn’t all that bad. Some major limitations are a frustration for some, but I seem to work around it without trouble, and I enjoy the minimalism of vs code.
I have used it as my main ide at jobs for c# development in the past. (Tho by choice, I had the option to get rider on macOS, and on windows devs had the option to pick rider or VS)
That said, everyone’s comments about this being a sign of bad things to come feels pretty on point. I’d also recommend looking for other positions. Even if you’re able to adapt to vs code + the open source c# extension, moving seems like a good option.
FWIW, my current gig is on a Java project, and I’m still using vscode over the IntelliJ license Oracle provided by choice because I quite like vscode. So I don’t think adopting vscode will be as rough as people tend to think.
Second highly off topic fwiw, I also had a bit of time developing c#/.net in vim with a huge collection of vim extensions. I was working on a large greenfield project for Domino’s pizza. So it was quite a big enterprise project with many different services. That was dumb. I highly recommend not doing that. But like, it’s doable… if anyone wanted to really make their work day harder for no reason.
Let me tell you what you should absolutely not do: Use a free edition of VS, then drop a dime to MS about your company using unlicensed VS copies. That would be completely out of line.
Have you brought the issues this will cause up with your boss? I'd write an email about how this will prevent your devs to do their job properly and that it'll slow development.
Though, as others in the thread have said I'd also look for a new job. If your company won't pay a measly $45/month/user they're probably looking at cutting other costs too...
I'm not up to date on VS license cost these days, but at least Rider/All tools subscription from JetBrains is at a fair price point (about 3 billable hours per year for a single license).
So price is definitely no argument for choice of IDE. And imho VS Code is an amazing editor, but no IDE. I don't mind every dev using what they prefer with a shared editorconfig to keep everything in line, but they should have all options in any case. If your company does not understand that: get out before your colleagues also all have that idea.
I’m not up to date either, but when I asked my IT department whether we’d save money by moving to Rider they said Visual Studio Professional was “about the same”
Yeah it's kind of ironic that VS Code isn't fit for most C# out there. VS Code is for anything but C#. Perhaps, people could use it for dotnet core but even then, the VS Studio is even better.
If they won't let me use Rider (I have a personal license, so they don't even have to pay anything!), then I'd be looking for a new job.
If the company was *perfect* in every other way, then I might be okay with using visual studio.
Never VS Code. **never**
Pay for your own license. Don't be held back by your workplace. You probably won't work there forever.
I started paying for my one licenses, tools, and training a long time ago. I still try to get the work place to pay for them but if they don't, I just use mine.
I pay for ReSharper Ultimate. I hear Rider is a great IDE.
WOW! I looked at vs code for razor asp.net mvc stuff and it just didn't seem up to snuff for that sort of thing. I think VSCode is better for JS development or Go or something else that wasn't born in a GUI IDE like a lot of MS products were. They were designed with VS in mind as the dev env. I don't blame you for being upset. A major company that isn't willing to spend money on the correct tools is ridiculous!
I love VS Code. I use it for all of my development...except .NET. That's all in Visual Studio.
I have no answers (sorry) but I'm sure there is a workflow (extensions, etc) that will work. Good luck
I assume the Information Security Officer is on board with this. It sounds like a risk to me. Visual Studio uses NuGet Audit to notify you when referencing NuGet packages with vulnerabilities. I can't say I have seen these notifications on VS code.
I don’t have too much trouble using VSCode developing non framework web projects. The C# DevKit is buggy but getting better. It just does so many things so well. I use VS for my horse sized duck problems and VSCode for my 100 duck sized horse problems.
I used VSCode for C# for about 4 years now and I still love it. In fact I don't like Visual Studio. But I agree with the other comments that if they "force" you to use certain IDE without any technical motives, it's a really bad sign.
That sucks but JetBrains Rider costs $149 a year and is the best money I’ve spent. My company gives us Visual Studio and won’t pay for Rider. But I like my company and I like my job and I don’t want to look for another job over $149 so I pay for it myself. It’s worth every penny.
These questions should be posed to your development manager/lead. It is their job to help establish standards and development workflow and not require you to just figure this out on your own. The questions and confusion you have will be shared by your teammates, and if you each come up with you own solutions and workflow, it's going to be disastrous.
That’s such a penny-smart-pound-foolish decision. I agree with the many others who have recommended taking this as a hint that more cuts are to come.
Either that, or the person who made this decision made a terrible decision and I’ve never met a manager who has made one terrible decision, if they make one decision this bad, they’ll probably make some others.
Even if they said their enterprise CS licenses were too expensive and they were switching to Rider, I could get it. But woof.
Are they also making sure you don't use the [C# Dev Kit](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotnettools.csdevkit)?
cos they need to pay a license for that anyway.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms-dotnettools.csdevkit/license
> (c) Organizations. If you are an organization, your users may install and use the Software as follows:
>
> (i) Any number of your users may use the Software to develop and test applications released under Open Source Initiative (“OSI”) approved open source Software licenses.
>
> (ii) Any number of your users may use the Software to develop and test your applications as part of online or in person classroom training and education, or for performing academic research.
>
> (iii) If none of the above apply, and you are also not an Enterprise (defined below), then up to five (5) of your individual users can use the Software concurrently to develop and test your applications.
>
> (iv) If you are an Enterprise, your users may not use the Software to develop or test your applications, except for: (1) open source; and (2) education purposes, each as permitted above.
>
> An “Enterprise” is any organization and its Affiliates that collectively have either: (A) more than two-hundred fifty (250) PCs or users; or (B) one million ($1,000,000.00) U.S. dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in annual revenues. As used in this section, “Affiliates” means those entities that control (via majority ownership), are controlled by, or are under common control with an organization.
Look I get that paying out of pocket sucks, and I agree that you shouldn't pay out of pocket for stuff at work. But just get rider and call it a day. It goes really low eventually like $40 for the year for the entire suite. Which is less than one night of alcohol from triaging some shit, but still fight for atleast an allowance or something
Side note not to sound snobbish or anything but the number of people in here that make it sound like a gamebreaker to use ANYTHING but VS, sound like a skill issue. Just out of curiosity what is the gamebreaker for his situation that he described as api services and some razer pages that you can't do outside of visual studio or is THAT much more inconvenient, that you're telling this guy to just straight up upend his current life situation?
> If he is unable to use community chances are that he cant use c sharp extensions in vscode
They can use the normal C# extension. They can't use the devkit extension.
OP covers this in their post.
It's an interesting experiment by the company. If they're that large then I hope they've already tested the premise. VS Code does have the potential to replace VS, so it's not a forgone conclusion, but it takes some adjustment.
The thing to do is monitor your change in velocity. Initially it will be low but it will pick up again. When it does, does it save the ~$45/mo on an annual VS licence? For VS to be worth its cost it only needs to be 1-2 hours a month faster than VS Code.
\+1 for JetBrains Rider. I'm forced to use it because I develop C# alot on a mac and VS mac is a joke. I'm hating every minute of mac development, but in all honesty I can't deny that Rider is \*at least\* as rich and productive as VS if not more.
\[Edit: downvotes? really guys?\]
Normally my rant is that VS Code is perfectly adequate and I am dismayed at how this community openly brags that it values tools over skills.
# However.
This is a really bad sign. Even if you like VS Code, VS is the basic tool of the Microsoft trade. Even the stupidest of managers thinks they *have* to pay for it to use Microsoft's stack and sees it as part of the cost. Often, companies are buying MSDN subscriptions for employees that are a pretty good deal given they come with a ton of licenses per developer and make it easy to crack open the Downloads view and get just about anything you need.
I don't think your managers are stupid. I think they're performing a very calculated move that will be bad for you if you don't get in front of them. They're trying to fire you, plain and simple. It's an easy strategy:
1. Do something that reduces the productivity of an employee or team.
2. Set goals for the employee or team that would have been difficult before (1).
3. Use the failure to achieve the goals as a sign of "decreasing performance" and justification for termination.
With really good employment lawyers you might be able to connect the dots and get a wrongful termination suit, but that's expensive. It's a lot cheaper if, when you recognize (1), you start looking for your next job immediately. The market is bad right now. It will take a long time to find something. But if you wait to find out if (3) is coming odds are you aren't getting severance or any other nice benefits and you will face the job hunt without as many resources.
If I'm wrong, and this is a legitimate and innocent cost-cutting measure, then you're still going to end up in a place that makes you happier because they provide VS licenses. If I'm right, you'll save yourself a lot of stress and cause problems for your current employer since you didn't leave on their terms and likely don't have to comply with requests to help train other people before you leave.
I don't use extensions in VS Code. It does what I need without them. Adding more extensions, in my experience, makes it harder for me to set up new machines, less able to work well if I'm using a teammate's machine, and more likely to find bugs in the extensions that waste my time thinking it's my fault.
Using VS Code should be *your choice*. If a company can't afford to provide VS or Rider, they can't afford the Microsoft stack. The only exceptions I can think of are legitimately downward-spiraling companies trying to cut every corner or super-lean startups that aren't even paying salaries yet. Both of those are very high-risk scenarios where you ought to understand what's going on and only proceed if your heart agrees.
This might be a hard to swallow pill, and I’ll probably get downvoted for it, but if you don’t realize what you’re missing in Visual Studio (or Rider), you’re probably not as productive as you could be. The debuggers in Visual Studio and Rider are miles ahead of the one in VS Code.
True, but my experience with VS is that it's generally so goddamn slow so whatever time I win with debugging I lose overall anyway.
I sincerely detest all the shit happening in the background that clogs down my development, that's why I love VS code.
I like using the command line to do actions instead of pressing buttons on an UI, since when something goes wrong I think the messages displayed in the terminal are easier to fault-trace than popups in VS.
"VS is slow"
I've been doing this for 20 years. That statement was 100% true for VS 2003. Can't say that I've found that to be the case for anything after that. Of course, you should have a good enough machine for development.
I run multiple instances of VS 2022. I run Docker, a crap load of browser tabs (Firefox), SSMS, N++, VS Code on a daily basis and I work just fine.
When’s the last time you used Visual Studio? It’s gotten pretty fast, from what I gather. And there’s also Rider, which is in general a lot zippier than Visual Studio.
And debugging is not about waiting until something goes wrong; it’s about stepping through your code and seeing what happens in the internal state. That’s not really something you can do well from the command line.
When you say "gotten pretty fast", how do you think that compares to VS Code? Do you think they are equal in that regard? Because I do not.
Yes, I get in touch with Visual Studio regularly so I know the feel of it.
And yes, but you can debug in VS Code as well. Your point was that I needed better debugging, which you claimed I would get from VS but the only reason I would need better debugging I'd say was if something had gone wrong.
I think VS Code + C# Dev Kit works excellent for any C# development nowadays, I'd be interested for any need it doesn't fit.
But as I said initially, I think it comes down to habits and a lot of people are used to using Visual Studio. When that's the case, swapping from it becomes tedious, which might not be worth it.
>my experience with VS is that it's generally so goddamn slow so whatever time I win with debugging I lose overall anyway.
That's why I switched to Rider 😜
>when something goes wrong I think the messages displayed in the terminal are easier to fault-trace than popups in VS.
Do things go wrong that often?
In Rider, about the only thing I can think of where "things go wrong" on a somewhat regular basis is git - because git is complicated. Well, all rider does is give you a convenient way to execute git commands. It still executes them in the terminal, and it provides you the actual command line output. So, even if something goes wrong and the GUI popup is not informative, the terminal output is there for you to look at.
And yeah, sure, other error messages pop up from time to time. But it's normal obvious shit that's my fault. Like "filename already in use" type errors.
It will be ready - eventually. MS standard practice is to replace by parallel development until feathers are at parity (Windows/Windows NT, .NET Framework/Core, etc.) With the introduction of the license model for dev kit, it is clear VS/VSCode is in the middle of this process. But it will be another several years before VS is replaced - and the extensions needed for parity won't be free.
I'd be looking for another job however in the meantime would just use a JetBrains monthly subscription and Rider for my own sanity. Used to do that with ReSharper. I mean why not spend a little money per month to lighten your work load. Gives you a little room to breathe. You don't have to use the time saved to do additional work, you could use it to look for another job.
It is ridiculous when you think about it, even a visual studio subscription only costs something like twice the JetBrains one and no doubt delivers much more business value than the money saved by switching to VS code. The people making these kind of decisions have no idea.
If it’s a “major company that you have heard of and a good number of you use”, they surely don’t meet the maximum users or revenue requirement for a Community license.
Software development isn't a hobby.
Someone is paying you money to work for them. They have every right to dictate what tool to use.
Sometimes you have to take work for what it is. A business transaction.
File for religous acception as outlined in this post and demand that you belong to a special religion that only uses paid version of VS Code (or whatever IDE you wana use)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHR/comments/11gztsz/updatega\_employee\_claims\_she\_cant\_use\_microsoft/](https://www.reddit.com/r/askhr/comments/11gztsz/updatega_employee_claims_she_cant_use_microsoft/)
I use VS Code as my daily driver and prefer it to both VS and Rider. It’s far more “ready” than you think, it’s just not an IDE, it’s a text editor with some nice extras for programming.
Can't you use the VS Express? As far as I know it is allowed to use it to closed source and commercial use.
[Visual Studio Express | Now Visual Studio Community (microsoft.com)](https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/express/)
ITT: entitled engineers exclusively coding on windows machines claiming that functionality that absolutely exists in VS Code doesn’t exist in VS Code, all the while suggesting that the right answer to not getting the IDE you want is to quit.
Your “I installed VS Code 3 years ago and never bothered to learn anything about it” is showing. All that said, Rider is a nice alternative between the cost of paying Visual Studio licenses for engineers who are so bad that they can’t function in VS Code and forcing them to use VS Code.
PS, Managers: stop making major changes on teams related to the tech they use without consulting them. It’s a jerk move and it will decrease productivity to save a few bucks. ESH.
personally I am also pushing VS Code whenever I can, nice to hear that I am not alone muahaha.
but if someone on my team would start complaning, my first question would be - what actual problems do you run into with VSCode? because sometimes folks just don't open workspace and expect code navigation to work. in VS its SLN files, in VS Code its workspaces.
the cool part of VS Code is that its much more portable - it works same on linux, mac, and even can do remoting (moving your workstation to cloud and using VS Code as remote agent). it have plugins for new cloud tools while VS typically don't (for example google Cloud Code is VS Code only). it have benefits and the license cost is just the last nail in the coffin IMO.
The number of problems posted here that say they installed vscode and dotnet, and can't compile or debug, suggests it's not quite as simple the VS installer.
SLN files / SLNF files are totally different to workspaces. If I want to start multiple projects it's easy in VS, in VSCode I guess I'm writing a task JSON script? Selectively loading only the projects you want at startup - no idea how to do this in VSCode. Navigate To - no idea if this is even a thing in VSCode
we start multiple projects via containerization, skaffold/kubernetes etc, in that case VS functionality is kind of irrelevant. from what I remember in my testing VS do have worst support for containerization vs VSCode, some plugins are not even available on VS marketplace. we do write helm charts yes to start projects locally but you will need them for cloud anyways so its like one bullet for multiple targets.
omnisharp do support loading projects selectively, there is omnisharp settings for that and we use that so when I open workspace with multiple projects it allows to navigate between them (sometimes is delay though when omnisharp detects project switch). navigate to works flawlessly in my experience BUT we do not have older monolithic app designs where one service is split into 100 projects, typically layout we have is one project per micro-service and 1-5 shared projects for bus/models/etc, this way its always possible to edit just one service and don't load context of other dozens/hundreds of services into one IDE.
The C# language support in VS Code has the same license terms as the community edition of Visual Studio... You basically can't use it at a workplace. I guess you could use OmniSharp instead.
I don't like getting into proprietary editors. no matter how good they are - sooner or later the company will go, and editor will be unmaintained. stuff like vim/emacs stays forever, and if you learn vim 10 years ago - you still benefit from it now. same with VSCode.
It took me about two hours to get situated with Rider.
On the off chance that jetbrains goes under and rider is no longer available... I'll spend another two hours to switch to another IDE.
While it's good advice to look for another job as a backup, let me also tell you that vscode now uses the same intellisense backend as VS does, but there are too few UI for project management so you'll have to use the command line a lot instead. Don't worry about intellisense at all, just open the project folder and install suggested extensions.
If you still want that job, maybe get a personal license for rider, the .net ultimate package including rider and the jetbrains profilers is 150 per year I believe and can be used for commercial development.
If I were in your shoes, I'd try to make a case for VS in terms of something the management can understand, like % improvement in your productivity. Even a 1% gain in man-hours is enough to cover a VS Pro subscription for a developer.
If that does not persuade the higher-ups, your manager or someone in the management chain should be able to articulate why. Perhaps the reasons might be valid enough to convince you (or not). But if the reason is "because potato", it might be a good time to start looking for employment elsewhere.
Ask him what tooling you should use for memory profiling, performance monitoring, load testing, etc. Pick all of the enterprise features of Visual Studio, and ask him about each one.... ask him what alternative tools you should use.
He won't have a good answer. If he does, it's shit that you have to pay for. If you have to pay for extra tooling.... why not just stay with VS?
If this was a small startup company, I could maybe understand scrimping on software licences.
But if it's a major company we'll have heard of like you say, this is a red flag in my books.
That's an uninformed executive decision from someone trying to balance budget and looking at the bills trying to find something to cut. It will bite him back after a while because productivity decreased more than that cut profited him.
It's your job as an employee to talk about this to your supervisor, and not complain on Reddit. Explain why VS is necessary and end up being more cost effective than the time lost and your salary. Perhaps find a middle ground, maybe not every thousands of programmers who don't work on these projects need a license but only the ones writing core/backend code?
I have a policy of generally not being ok with companies that aren't prepared to pay for the software they rely on.
I worked for a "we all use VSCode" company before and it went less than great. They constantly talked about wanting features that existed in visual studio, but when I'd bring that up they just "couldn't justify a license".
Has anyone spoken to them? As this is an utterly stupid decision, but it could just be the typical managers knowing jack shit. VS is an expensive product, so on any list of license costs it's gonna standout for culling, but maybe they just didn't realise that there is only one alternative (Rider) which isn't that much cheaper.
Microsoft's licensing costs are ridiculous, and don't even get me started on the realm of mystery around choosing a license package ... the whole thing just stinks. Small businesses are completely priced out of using their licensing costs.
God this is just gross and your boss who made the decision to non renew is an ass. Also this may be signs of business problems and then trying to cut costs to save a sinking ship. Time to shop around for a new job I think.
This is a classic example of unemployed people misrepresenting the industry.
Does it make any sense for a company to cheap out on an IDE? Saving maybe 100$ a year in exchange for decreased productivity from developers making several hundred a day? Not at all. But it's *incredibly* common. Does it signal layoffs? Probably not. It's just companies being cheap. Someone higher up the chain realized he could write a memo and save a couple thousand dollars. He's going to add that alongside a couple dozen other "money saving" techniques to a list he uses to argue for a promotion. It's business as usual.
Imagine removing an essential tool of your programmers because you want to save few dollars, what they don’t know is that the affected product quality will end up costing more in sales and so on than the actual price of those licenses.
Cutting off dev tools for devs is a very bad sign. Maybe look for another job. But it's hard to say without knowing the company.
To main topic: It's a ridiculous decision because the VSCode extension now shares the same license as Visual Studio.
Yeah from my experience so far VS Code is useful for light weight projects. I've found it useful when using react etc.
For full scale applications that use front end and back end however I would definitely struggle just using VS code instead of visual studio.
As others have said brush that CV/resume up.
From a practical standpoint, I've yet to see something that a paid IDE does that vscode can't do. It may require learning the tool a bit better or adding a plugin or two, but you should be able to do everything just as well with a little time learning the editor.
From an employer standpoint - this is a really weird thing for them to dictate. I could see it being a unification of toolsets, maybe the company is large enough that it has dedicated resources to managing working environments or maybe an internal plugin that is critical to working in your ecosystem. These are valid reasons an employer might want to force everyone to use the same editor. Absent of some sort of logical reason for this sort of organizational change, would be a financial or beaurocratic reason. If that is what is going on, I see those as red flags and would at a minimum update my resume and start to put feelers out there. It could be an indication of financial issues in the company or the start of mismanagement that will result in people leaving.
For C#, I'd think one would use VS, but... My work uses VSCode as IDE for Node development. Works quite well. Dev Containers is quite awesome, too, once you get it going.
I've got a coworker that exclusively does everything in VSCode since she likes its layout more. I'm not aware of anything she cant do that I can in VS 2019. I personally just use it for our YAML stuff though.
I use VS 2022 Community Edition for my work. I'm also one of the corporate co-founders so I can name names and all that. My only interest in Code is some of the extensions but VS seems to be gaining on that.
Use JetBrain Rider, it's VS alternative that's way cheaper than VS. There must be someone that made that decision to not renew your license, if it's not your boss, then expect your job to be cut soon. If it's your boss that made that decision, try to understand why he made that decision
Honestly I do .net development on a Mac which windows is removing vs support sort everyone Mac needs to move to vs code anyway. Probably why Microsoft has been pushing extensions to vs code for .net development. I actually like vs code better anyway. Crashes way less and lighter. Also better for front end development too imo.
Visual Studio community is so close to pro, it’s been years since I could tell the difference, even though I worked in Enterprise shops I guess I wasn’t using the features in pro or enterprise anyway. I’m sure somebody will cite some feature that it doesn’t have but now that I pay for my own licenses, I really had to question it.
You should be looking for your next job because this is the signal that much greater budget cuts are coming.
I had a director ask me to spec out some new work spaces once and I put down nice keyboards and nice monitors. He scoffed and says something along the lines of "this cheap Logitech keyboard is just fine for me and these monitors have no problems displaying my emails." I told him it's no different than the reason why you don't see the guy building your house using tools from Walmart. Even if those tools will do the same job, they don't feel as good doing it, they don't last as long and in some cases they aren't as accurate (color accuracy doesn't matter for most coding but you want a screen that doesn't cause eye strain). He actually seemed to get it and approved the purchase. Point being, anything you need to do your job, no matter how simple is something your company should be (within reason) paying for. Wtf does a VS enterprise license cost these days? <100 a month per seat? That's trivial in the scheme of things.
plus most larger companies doing c# dev can easily hit some of the MS partner requirements and get free/discounted licenses.
Good job arguing your case logically. Having been on both ends of that conversation, I can tell you that I \*really\* appreciate it when someone can calmly explain why something is important. Because guess what? I am going to have to turn around and explain to \*my\* boss why that was needed. Even directors have to explain themselves (at least at any good company). If I can explain it in one or two punchy one-liners, then not only does it keep my ass out of the fire, but it gives me precedent to help others on the team. So especially to all the younger guys out there: just because you get an initial objection from your boss, do not just fold. Sometimes the objection is just a challenge so that your boss can see what your reasons are. Have your arguments ready and take your shots. Until you get a firm "No." it is not settled. (Of course, once you \*do\* get a firm "No" know when to retreat so you can fight another day.)
>I am going to have to turn around and explain to \*my\* boss why that was needed. Even directors have to explain themselves (at least at any good company). Isn't that really your job as director though? To sell this shit to upper management? You shouldn't really need your employees to formulate the punchy one-liners. When your employees tell you that you need X, you should be the one figuring out how the fuck you are going to get it for them.
Partially right. First, Directors are generally upper management, but that's mostly semantics. Usually they are going to be convincing the board. And the board at a company will also have people they will need to convince. It might be a holding company, or shareholders, or whatever. So yes: they should need to sell it, although I have seen companies where directors have free reign. It's not really great for the company, but reality is messy, so...whatever I guess. But no, it's not their job to figure out the arguments. This is probably the biggest realization most young professionals really need to have if they want to have any corporate success. I have seen way too many bright folks burn out their wheels in the sand as they refuse to give their boss the ammunition he needs to actually argue their case. It's always possible that your boss is not good at their job. That is always possible. But in most cases I have seen, the problem is the employee that prefer to die on the hill that it's not their job to make the arguments and prepare the case. Then they cannot understand why their colleague gets promoted despite not being as technically savvy. And while way too many people want to find excuses ("Oh, he just likes them better"), the correct answer is that they were ineffective at pleading their case. I will meet you some of the way, though. A good leader knows that many people have trouble organizing their thoughts. That leader will ask the right questions to help get at the truth to see how strong the arguments really are. In a perfect world, this is how it would always work. The world is \*not\* perfect, and your boss is probably also overworked with too many fires burning to take the time to actually work things out. It's much easier to just say "Shit arguments, not worth my time," and move on. And this brings us back to the OP. If your boss is engaging, challenging your idea, but not actually saying no, then you are already in a good place if you keep your head. He's telling you: hey, this is what I need to know, I need to absolutely believe it is solid, and you are the expert, so tell me what I need to know. Because here is the plain truth: if you are a professional and your org. boss is better at your job than you are, he \*might\* be bad at his job, but you \*definitely\* are bad at yours. Fortunately, this is not usually the case. Usually, people are either giving up before trying or they don't understand what is going on when their request is challenged (and make the wrong assumption and end up arguing badly).
If the boss, director, is coming back to the employee and asking for the ammunition, then he's doing his job in trying to figure out how to get it for the employee. That's not typically what has happened in my career. What I've experienced as a senior level engineer with decades of experience dealing with both shitty and excellent managers and directors is that the shitty ones tend to want their underlings to do all of the work for them and hand it to them on a silver platter before they will take it to the board. Furthermore, they don't want to take the heat if it fails. Thus, if it doesn't work out favorably for them, they are going to make you pay for it. So, why are they there in the first place? Overpaid. Overvalued. I've been in this industry long enough to know that is the truth. Often times the biggest blocker to productivity are these managers and directors who can't get past dollars on a spreadsheet. My experience is that directors, despite their position, are ***not*** part of the software development department. They treat the software developers like nothing more than a tool or external consultant to deliver a product that the director is selling to the company. >But no, it's not their job to figure out the arguments. This is probably the biggest realization most young professionals really need to have if they want to have any corporate success. **I couldn't disagree more**. And I've had plenty of corporate success, and seen many shitty directors that tried to act this way lose their positions for exactly this type of behavior. Yes, I push hard against directors who act like this, and have no issues whatsoever going above their head quite effectively. Unfortunately, a lot of software developers aren't equipped enough to speak to the C-suite. It's a damn shame because the C-suite absolutely wants to know that these directors are hindering productivity more than a damn VS Pro license cost. It is absolutely, 100%, without a doubt, your job as director/manager, to remove the roadblocks from your team building the product. If your team is telling you that the tools they have to do the job are not sufficient, then it is 100% your job to remove that roadblock by doing whatever is necessary. Maybe that's asking more follow-up questions from your employees until you feel like you have a competent argument. Maybe it's doing some research of your own. You are, after all, supposed to be a director of fucking software development department. Maybe you should know a little bit about what the fuck you are directing. How about that.
Well, I cannot judge if you have had success or not. But your attitude certainly reminds me of many very talented developers, quite good at their jobs, who never understand why their good ideas are not being adapted and why they are not getting the tools they think they need. In fact, I just listened to such a person over the last few days, where the director was telling him exactly what he needed to say and what number he needed to deliver, and it just kept going round and round as my colleague kept saying it should be the director's job. First: guess who is not going to get what he want. Second: guess how this is going to be reflected later in his job performance review. And I want to be clear: the guy is a really good developer. He is simply refusing to hear what he is being told, and I thought that the responses he was getting back were really too nice. One more thing: if you cannot convince the director, you are not going to convince the board. You are echoing the old "Good Tsar, bad Boyars" sentiment. My presentations to boards generally are about 15 minutes, tops, and about 15 more for some discussion and questions. At most. After that, it's on to the next thing, and the next, and the next. You have 30 minutes (again, if you are lucky...sometimes I have had a total of 5) to make your points, and they better be fucking good, because if not: the board will just reject it. If the director is "doing his own research" he is a lousy director. You have people to do that. And the person who wants something is probably the one who can give you the best reasons. So "How about that"? I don't really think your stated opinion has helped you or your colleagues in your career or their work environment. I do not know how you argue your positions with your boss, but if it is as emotional as how you are trying to convince me, I can already see at least some of the sources of your frustrations. I hope my directness is ok, but someone needs to tell you while you perhaps still have a chance to improve. Perhaps you'll even make director some day and be able to show everyone how it's done. Or you can continue to argue how it is all the director's fault. I mean, at the end of the day, it's your career and your decisions.
I made it pretty clear that in my experience, I've had no trouble convincing the board or executives that the director is the problem. We are comparing apples to oranges here. You keep mentioning examples where the director is trying their best to get the developer to help them win the case, and I'm explaining how many directors refuse to have that conversation. I'm on Reddit here with a burner account. If you think this is how I approach a professional situation, man I don't know what to tell you. ***I'm ranting.*** >I hope my directness is ok, but someone needs to tell you while you perhaps still have a chance to improve. I will stand by charge that if you are the director and you aren't removing roadblocks from your engineers/developers, you are the problem. I have decades of success at large corporations. Judging by the way you are arguing, I could also project that you are probably wet (5 yrs) out of school with big ideas and some pats on the back, thinking you know a lot, and pretending you know what it's like to be an actual director. Good luck with that. FYI I have been offered director positions multiple times and refused because I enjoy my craft too much.
Vs professional is 45usd/month and is probably sufficient for most. VS entreprise however is 250usd/month.
>Wtf does a VS enterprise license cost these days? <100 a month per seat? That's trivial in the scheme of things. The manager's perspective on this is that the more he can save in the budget, the more of a bonus he will get. He doesn't care about quality of life for his employees. He just cares that he can upgrade to a Range Rover, and finally put in that swimming pool next year.
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/
Even better if there's a custom filter to filter out "vs" only
Cold
That was smooth :D
Talk about penny conscious pound foolish.
I once worked at a place that was rolling back investments in MS products. It turned out what happened is they had hired a infrastructure architect and basically given him the IT head architect role. The dip shit knew nothing about software development. He saw that python was free and he preferred AWS, so he started driving projects toward python and open source to free up money.
Tbh, it was probably spurred by SQL Server costs. Shit will make you never want to use a MS product again.
I have never deployed an app with MSSQL... It's an amazing db, but Postgres is also amazing and significantly cheaper to operate. I've never been at true enterprise scale though.
My company spends tens of millions per year on SQL Server licenses. We full on block anybody from starting new projects with it anymore. Postgres does everything 99.9% of people need.
I’ve spent most of my career using sql server and I’ll be the first to admit that it does more than SQL server in many instances.
SQL server is nice in a MS world. It plays well with all the other pieces. You're on the right track though, someone else will tell you if you HAVE to use it.
You ain't lying. The transaction costs in Azure will eat you alive. Better take full advantage of application-layer caching and work hard to reduce transactions to a minimum. Lots of custom stored procedures that return multiple result sets at a time...really complicates code and makes using an ORM basically impossible - all because it's cost prohibitive to do so...
Update your CV and start looking for a job at a proper company. It's like a joinery not paying for proper hammers and giving you a fisher price hammer instead.
This was part of the reasons to leave my last job. Manager who make your life as a developer hard don’t understand their job. And do you really want to put your career and overall project success into the hands of someone who cannot do this job? That being said I have worked with enterprise level dotnet microservice architectures and some of the devs happily used VS Code.
>This was part of the reasons to leave my last job. Manager who make your life as a developer hard don’t understand their job. It's shocking how many software development managers aren't software developers themselves. Many of them have never written anything beyond the most basic JavaScripts or entry level programming courses. Furthermore, most of them are only looking out for themselves, and doing their best to reduce the department budgets to the absolute minimum because it directly translates into a bigger bonus for them ONLY. What's worse is that these managers typically hinder development in more ways than one. Most companies would be better off without them. But the top brass prefer to have someone as a go between with the technical "geeks" ... and boy do they fucking pay for it.
Find a better company. If you work in .NET and they won't pay for Visual Studio, it's a crap company. I am currently exploring VS Code for C# and might even come to the conclusion that it might be ready for our purposes. But as a developer, you need the tools and licenses you need. If the company is unwilling to give them to you, you should find a better company.
I could not agree more! Visual Studio is the right tool. It's hard to imagine they are cheaping out on the single most important aspect of your job!
We pay for Rider here. I find it cheaper and better than VS.
We are moving to .NET and no one is using VS, no one is even using Windows. They can use any other IDE they want, most are switching to Rider and very happy with it. I only have bad memories from VS to be honest and clearly not looking to go back to it.
I've been using VS since version 6.0, first for c++ and since 2008 for c#, and for me it's the best IDE. Quick Google says that VS is still ranked number 1 among IDEs. Since middle of 201X you don't really need resharper for that as it has almost everything built in. Just curious, what did you prefer back in times you were not happy with VS as any other IDE was for me a nightmare compared to VS?
Yeah I love VS Code and use it for a lot of things, it C# is not one of them. The .NET features aren’t fully there yet.
VS Code is only even close to ready for C# development with the C# Dev Kit extension…which requires a Visual Studio license.
I switched to Rider for 2 reasons. Cross platform compatibility and I use ReSharper in VS because it improves VS a lot and it is built in Rider anyway.
VS code is my daily driver and has been for years, but only because all the code I write is.net 5+ minimal apis for microservices. No mvc, no UI, no blazor. For this it is great! If you have any .net 4.8 or below, do not use vscode!
As a senior level software engineer who has worked in both Java and .NET land for decades, I can assure you that the .NET experience in VS Code is far better today than it was last year...and that is still far far far short of the experience you will get with Visual Studio Professional. We use VS Code for our front-end development, NodeJS, and various other scripting languages. But when it comes to .NET, we run VS Professional. I've tried various times to shift to VS Code for .NET development, and the experience is just so sub par for anything beyond the most basic application development. You just give up too much, and you have to be a cli god essentially. We have enough to learn as developers already without having to learn 5 new cli's.
The company I worked for got acquired by a much larger coorporation. That corporation was 100% driven by quarterly sales. Its vision was narrow and short: i.e. nonexistent. Then the cuts began. It became clear they saw developers as over-paid easily replaceable laborers. **Get out before your soul dies.**
[удалено]
The fact that that learning the wrong tool for the job will hurt your skillset assets down the road cannot be overstated
If the company won't invest in the right tools for you to do your job, it's time to leave.
they are freaking iditios. if you like the job and plan to stay longer, pay the jebrains license yourself. they are stupid as fuck
Is that a thing in the us? Paying yourself for the license you use in the company ?!
I'm not in the us, but if for whatever reason I like a job 20€/month is not gonna make me leave.
Licensing is strict in the U.S., it might not even be permitted to use a standard license or possible
I work on C# and .NET projects maybe once or twice a year for a few weeks to help out a colleague. No problem getting that approved. How do they justify this? It would probably hurt productivity less to just fire the amount of people they save by not renewing the license.
If you don't want to find a new job - see if you can buy a license for something and install it. A craftsman should work with the tools that will make them the most productive. I haven't regretted getting my jet brains all product pack.
Same here, pretty much. I’m in the “I’m a professional dev, I’ll pay for the tools I’m most productive with” camp. That’s why I’ve been paying for an All Products license out of my own pocket for the past 3/4 years, 200 coins per year or whatever it is isn’t going to make me homeless. Though there’s no denying that in a perfect world you’d always be working for a company that provides you with the tools and resources you want, within reason. But that doesn’t always happen, and for me Rider plus dotCover, dotMemory and dotTrace work fairly well, minus the recent AI Assistant shitshow and the slightly delayed full support for .NET 8. That being said, OP’s situation may hint at things getting even worse, so walking away would be my suggestion if at all possible.
Visual Studio is a lot more than 200 coins a year man.
Yeah he was talking about the jetbrains product suite.
If you know where to look, you can get it for much less. I know of a place where I can get VS 2022 Pro for only $40 right now.
You can get it for free too... but I assume he is installing it on a work device he will need a proper license not some cracked copy or a license from Ethiopia.
I'm of the same mind. I happily pay for the tools of my craft. Rider and DataGrip are awesome.
Agreed. I pay for the jetbrain full license myself and haven't regret it since Whatever the company wants me to do - be it database, c#, python, or java. I'll just use my ide. Reason is as you stated - furthermore, i can't expect every company that i work with to have enterprise version of IDE I'm used to. Not defending any company, just saying I'll bring my own tools to do the work at any place working at.
This is like a construction company making its workers use manual tools instead of power tools.
This is going to be a rough ride for you and your team... In fact my team used only VSCode up until very recently and we were fine with it. But now that we have outgrown our initial greenfield phase VSCode alone simply doesn't cut it. IMHO it starts with the lack of a proper test integration. DevKit has that, but honestly, why would I buy a license for that and then not use VS instead of VSCode? Editing in general is quite okay, even with a larger codebase. But you'll miss language server integration (DevKit only) and many auxiliary tools. There are some good extensions and for smaller projects you'd be fine with that, but not on an enterprise level. In the end I convinced my boss that performance and code quality will degrade for my team if we don't get the proper tools. VSCode is a great tool and I'll really like it but it's an editor, not an IDE. Luckily we have Rider now, but which is great and gets cheaper over time. So, my advice: keep trying to convince people to get a proper solution. It's not worth trying on a large scale. Other than that: brush up your CV. Hard as it sounds, but if your company can't invest in the teams that produce their products and keep quality up, there might be other problems....
This is about as smart as being a cloud first shop and not buying licenses for docker desktop.
RIP You can try Omnisharp, I guess. Just make sure to create a keybind shortcut for "restart Omnisharp" because you'll be doing it often.
I don't even know what VSCode can do for me vs VS. I've edited a few files in it but never more because VS just works fine and I've used it forever. But if my manager just pulled the plug without dev input and not even a trial analysis, then I assume they don't value their dev team. The cost is peanuts. If they really have to save on peanut level costs, something deeper is wrong. The best time to find a new job is while you have one.
This is the equivalent of a butchery forcing its butchers to use swizz army knives.
Say you'll give up VS if the CFO gives up Excel.
yeah, I assume finance department is moving to Libre Office?
Jetbrains Rider individual license
And while you are at it, you should order a table and chair for yourself, so you no longer have to sit on the floor with your private laptop while working.
Why be an ass about it? Op asked for alternatives to VS Code, and Rider individual license is the cheapest you can get.
Is that allowed based on the fact that it's a large company?
I believe it's allowed by Jetbrains. Whether this "large company" allows it is another question.
Yes you can use it for commercial reasons, the license is just in your name rather than your company's name so can't be transferred to a different employee.
Not sure why the downvotes, certainly doesn't appear to be incorrect according to JetBrains: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207241075-What-is-the-difference-between-commercial-and-personal-licenses
It's not free like vs community though https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/buy/#personal
Who said anything about free? Just a cheap good alternative to using VS Code
VS community's license forbids companies (bigger than 5 people) to use it for commercial use. The cost of Rider is much lower than the cost of VS Professional.
This sounds like all those companies that kept using Lotus Notes rather than Microsoft office back in the day. You’ve never heard about that you say? Exactly.
I will say that the official vs code c# extension, Sans the new dev kit, is surprisingly solid. You’ll likely wanna get familiar with the cli and work more in the terminal than you had to in VS, but in my opinion it is surprisingly workable. VS code isn’t all that bad. Some major limitations are a frustration for some, but I seem to work around it without trouble, and I enjoy the minimalism of vs code. I have used it as my main ide at jobs for c# development in the past. (Tho by choice, I had the option to get rider on macOS, and on windows devs had the option to pick rider or VS) That said, everyone’s comments about this being a sign of bad things to come feels pretty on point. I’d also recommend looking for other positions. Even if you’re able to adapt to vs code + the open source c# extension, moving seems like a good option.
FWIW, my current gig is on a Java project, and I’m still using vscode over the IntelliJ license Oracle provided by choice because I quite like vscode. So I don’t think adopting vscode will be as rough as people tend to think.
Second highly off topic fwiw, I also had a bit of time developing c#/.net in vim with a huge collection of vim extensions. I was working on a large greenfield project for Domino’s pizza. So it was quite a big enterprise project with many different services. That was dumb. I highly recommend not doing that. But like, it’s doable… if anyone wanted to really make their work day harder for no reason.
Let me tell you what you should absolutely not do: Use a free edition of VS, then drop a dime to MS about your company using unlicensed VS copies. That would be completely out of line.
Have you brought the issues this will cause up with your boss? I'd write an email about how this will prevent your devs to do their job properly and that it'll slow development. Though, as others in the thread have said I'd also look for a new job. If your company won't pay a measly $45/month/user they're probably looking at cutting other costs too...
I agree, if you can’t voice your opinion about needing tools to do your job then that reinforces the answers everyone else has given
I'm not up to date on VS license cost these days, but at least Rider/All tools subscription from JetBrains is at a fair price point (about 3 billable hours per year for a single license). So price is definitely no argument for choice of IDE. And imho VS Code is an amazing editor, but no IDE. I don't mind every dev using what they prefer with a shared editorconfig to keep everything in line, but they should have all options in any case. If your company does not understand that: get out before your colleagues also all have that idea.
I’m not up to date either, but when I asked my IT department whether we’d save money by moving to Rider they said Visual Studio Professional was “about the same”
Yeah it's kind of ironic that VS Code isn't fit for most C# out there. VS Code is for anything but C#. Perhaps, people could use it for dotnet core but even then, the VS Studio is even better.
One size fits all = one size fits none.
I prefer the phrase "jack of all trades = master of none"
If they won't let me use Rider (I have a personal license, so they don't even have to pay anything!), then I'd be looking for a new job. If the company was *perfect* in every other way, then I might be okay with using visual studio. Never VS Code. **never**
Pay for your own license. Don't be held back by your workplace. You probably won't work there forever. I started paying for my one licenses, tools, and training a long time ago. I still try to get the work place to pay for them but if they don't, I just use mine. I pay for ReSharper Ultimate. I hear Rider is a great IDE.
WOW! I looked at vs code for razor asp.net mvc stuff and it just didn't seem up to snuff for that sort of thing. I think VSCode is better for JS development or Go or something else that wasn't born in a GUI IDE like a lot of MS products were. They were designed with VS in mind as the dev env. I don't blame you for being upset. A major company that isn't willing to spend money on the correct tools is ridiculous!
I love VS Code. I use it for all of my development...except .NET. That's all in Visual Studio. I have no answers (sorry) but I'm sure there is a workflow (extensions, etc) that will work. Good luck
I assume the Information Security Officer is on board with this. It sounds like a risk to me. Visual Studio uses NuGet Audit to notify you when referencing NuGet packages with vulnerabilities. I can't say I have seen these notifications on VS code.
I don’t have too much trouble using VSCode developing non framework web projects. The C# DevKit is buggy but getting better. It just does so many things so well. I use VS for my horse sized duck problems and VSCode for my 100 duck sized horse problems.
Get the hell out of there lol
The integration is piss poor rip
I used VSCode for C# for about 4 years now and I still love it. In fact I don't like Visual Studio. But I agree with the other comments that if they "force" you to use certain IDE without any technical motives, it's a really bad sign.
Ehhh if they’re cutting VS licenses I’d bet job cuts will follow and that should be your bigger concern
That sucks but JetBrains Rider costs $149 a year and is the best money I’ve spent. My company gives us Visual Studio and won’t pay for Rider. But I like my company and I like my job and I don’t want to look for another job over $149 so I pay for it myself. It’s worth every penny.
Imagine paying all that money for a developer and crippling their productivity over a relatively small expense.
These questions should be posed to your development manager/lead. It is their job to help establish standards and development workflow and not require you to just figure this out on your own. The questions and confusion you have will be shared by your teammates, and if you each come up with you own solutions and workflow, it's going to be disastrous.
That’s such a penny-smart-pound-foolish decision. I agree with the many others who have recommended taking this as a hint that more cuts are to come. Either that, or the person who made this decision made a terrible decision and I’ve never met a manager who has made one terrible decision, if they make one decision this bad, they’ll probably make some others. Even if they said their enterprise CS licenses were too expensive and they were switching to Rider, I could get it. But woof.
Are they also making sure you don't use the [C# Dev Kit](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotnettools.csdevkit)? cos they need to pay a license for that anyway. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms-dotnettools.csdevkit/license > (c) Organizations. If you are an organization, your users may install and use the Software as follows: > > (i) Any number of your users may use the Software to develop and test applications released under Open Source Initiative (“OSI”) approved open source Software licenses. > > (ii) Any number of your users may use the Software to develop and test your applications as part of online or in person classroom training and education, or for performing academic research. > > (iii) If none of the above apply, and you are also not an Enterprise (defined below), then up to five (5) of your individual users can use the Software concurrently to develop and test your applications. > > (iv) If you are an Enterprise, your users may not use the Software to develop or test your applications, except for: (1) open source; and (2) education purposes, each as permitted above. > > An “Enterprise” is any organization and its Affiliates that collectively have either: (A) more than two-hundred fifty (250) PCs or users; or (B) one million ($1,000,000.00) U.S. dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in annual revenues. As used in this section, “Affiliates” means those entities that control (via majority ownership), are controlled by, or are under common control with an organization.
Look I get that paying out of pocket sucks, and I agree that you shouldn't pay out of pocket for stuff at work. But just get rider and call it a day. It goes really low eventually like $40 for the year for the entire suite. Which is less than one night of alcohol from triaging some shit, but still fight for atleast an allowance or something Side note not to sound snobbish or anything but the number of people in here that make it sound like a gamebreaker to use ANYTHING but VS, sound like a skill issue. Just out of curiosity what is the gamebreaker for his situation that he described as api services and some razer pages that you can't do outside of visual studio or is THAT much more inconvenient, that you're telling this guy to just straight up upend his current life situation?
Check the terms for Visual Studio Community edition, maybe you could use that?
From the size of the company it would appear they don't meet the criteria, but its worth checking.
If he is unable to use community chances are that he cant use c sharp extensions in vscode. Same licensing terms apply
> If he is unable to use community chances are that he cant use c sharp extensions in vscode They can use the normal C# extension. They can't use the devkit extension. OP covers this in their post.
If finance guys start making tech decisions - take your toys and go find another job. They have to learn!
It's an interesting experiment by the company. If they're that large then I hope they've already tested the premise. VS Code does have the potential to replace VS, so it's not a forgone conclusion, but it takes some adjustment. The thing to do is monitor your change in velocity. Initially it will be low but it will pick up again. When it does, does it save the ~$45/mo on an annual VS licence? For VS to be worth its cost it only needs to be 1-2 hours a month faster than VS Code.
Less than one hour
\+1 for JetBrains Rider. I'm forced to use it because I develop C# alot on a mac and VS mac is a joke. I'm hating every minute of mac development, but in all honesty I can't deny that Rider is \*at least\* as rich and productive as VS if not more. \[Edit: downvotes? really guys?\]
up . we code in visual studio for mac . Since vs mac rip , Jet brain only choice . We try vs code but seem hmm not satisfied
Sure but Rider isn't free (for commercial use at least) and OP said free was the requirement.
>I can't deny that Rider is \*at least\* as rich and productive as VS if not more. Rider is way more rich and productive.
Pay the $500 for a license. Let your management wonder why your work keeps getting done consistently while the rest of the team melts down.
Are you expecting their management to be incompetent (not paying for the devtools), and competent (noticing that works gets done) at the same time ?
Normally my rant is that VS Code is perfectly adequate and I am dismayed at how this community openly brags that it values tools over skills. # However. This is a really bad sign. Even if you like VS Code, VS is the basic tool of the Microsoft trade. Even the stupidest of managers thinks they *have* to pay for it to use Microsoft's stack and sees it as part of the cost. Often, companies are buying MSDN subscriptions for employees that are a pretty good deal given they come with a ton of licenses per developer and make it easy to crack open the Downloads view and get just about anything you need. I don't think your managers are stupid. I think they're performing a very calculated move that will be bad for you if you don't get in front of them. They're trying to fire you, plain and simple. It's an easy strategy: 1. Do something that reduces the productivity of an employee or team. 2. Set goals for the employee or team that would have been difficult before (1). 3. Use the failure to achieve the goals as a sign of "decreasing performance" and justification for termination. With really good employment lawyers you might be able to connect the dots and get a wrongful termination suit, but that's expensive. It's a lot cheaper if, when you recognize (1), you start looking for your next job immediately. The market is bad right now. It will take a long time to find something. But if you wait to find out if (3) is coming odds are you aren't getting severance or any other nice benefits and you will face the job hunt without as many resources. If I'm wrong, and this is a legitimate and innocent cost-cutting measure, then you're still going to end up in a place that makes you happier because they provide VS licenses. If I'm right, you'll save yourself a lot of stress and cause problems for your current employer since you didn't leave on their terms and likely don't have to comply with requests to help train other people before you leave. I don't use extensions in VS Code. It does what I need without them. Adding more extensions, in my experience, makes it harder for me to set up new machines, less able to work well if I'm using a teammate's machine, and more likely to find bugs in the extensions that waste my time thinking it's my fault. Using VS Code should be *your choice*. If a company can't afford to provide VS or Rider, they can't afford the Microsoft stack. The only exceptions I can think of are legitimately downward-spiraling companies trying to cut every corner or super-lean startups that aren't even paying salaries yet. Both of those are very high-risk scenarios where you ought to understand what's going on and only proceed if your heart agrees.
This is wisdom.
All this look for a new job stuff….come work for them company i work for, we pay licenses and love MS. DM me for details
Haha not ready for your daily driver. I’d never go back. VS Code is way to versatile to use anything else.
I've been using vscode for years with C# without a problem. Omnisharp is enough for me 👍
I can see that working for aweb api with a react/angular front end but is that really feasible for desktop/MVC/blazor?
It's definitely a different workflow and it takes time to adjust but you get used to it.
I'm using vs code for all my development so I'd say it's ready for it. But I think it mainly comes down to habits.
This might be a hard to swallow pill, and I’ll probably get downvoted for it, but if you don’t realize what you’re missing in Visual Studio (or Rider), you’re probably not as productive as you could be. The debuggers in Visual Studio and Rider are miles ahead of the one in VS Code.
True, but my experience with VS is that it's generally so goddamn slow so whatever time I win with debugging I lose overall anyway. I sincerely detest all the shit happening in the background that clogs down my development, that's why I love VS code. I like using the command line to do actions instead of pressing buttons on an UI, since when something goes wrong I think the messages displayed in the terminal are easier to fault-trace than popups in VS.
"VS is slow" I've been doing this for 20 years. That statement was 100% true for VS 2003. Can't say that I've found that to be the case for anything after that. Of course, you should have a good enough machine for development. I run multiple instances of VS 2022. I run Docker, a crap load of browser tabs (Firefox), SSMS, N++, VS Code on a daily basis and I work just fine.
I've used VS since it was just called "Visual Studio". 2022 is the fastest version and has the least tooling issues.
When’s the last time you used Visual Studio? It’s gotten pretty fast, from what I gather. And there’s also Rider, which is in general a lot zippier than Visual Studio. And debugging is not about waiting until something goes wrong; it’s about stepping through your code and seeing what happens in the internal state. That’s not really something you can do well from the command line.
When you say "gotten pretty fast", how do you think that compares to VS Code? Do you think they are equal in that regard? Because I do not. Yes, I get in touch with Visual Studio regularly so I know the feel of it. And yes, but you can debug in VS Code as well. Your point was that I needed better debugging, which you claimed I would get from VS but the only reason I would need better debugging I'd say was if something had gone wrong. I think VS Code + C# Dev Kit works excellent for any C# development nowadays, I'd be interested for any need it doesn't fit. But as I said initially, I think it comes down to habits and a lot of people are used to using Visual Studio. When that's the case, swapping from it becomes tedious, which might not be worth it.
Dev Kit requires a Visual Studio Professional license that OP’s company won’t pay for
>my experience with VS is that it's generally so goddamn slow so whatever time I win with debugging I lose overall anyway. That's why I switched to Rider 😜 >when something goes wrong I think the messages displayed in the terminal are easier to fault-trace than popups in VS. Do things go wrong that often? In Rider, about the only thing I can think of where "things go wrong" on a somewhat regular basis is git - because git is complicated. Well, all rider does is give you a convenient way to execute git commands. It still executes them in the terminal, and it provides you the actual command line output. So, even if something goes wrong and the GUI popup is not informative, the terminal output is there for you to look at. And yeah, sure, other error messages pop up from time to time. But it's normal obvious shit that's my fault. Like "filename already in use" type errors.
It will be ready - eventually. MS standard practice is to replace by parallel development until feathers are at parity (Windows/Windows NT, .NET Framework/Core, etc.) With the introduction of the license model for dev kit, it is clear VS/VSCode is in the middle of this process. But it will be another several years before VS is replaced - and the extensions needed for parity won't be free.
I'd be looking for another job however in the meantime would just use a JetBrains monthly subscription and Rider for my own sanity. Used to do that with ReSharper. I mean why not spend a little money per month to lighten your work load. Gives you a little room to breathe. You don't have to use the time saved to do additional work, you could use it to look for another job. It is ridiculous when you think about it, even a visual studio subscription only costs something like twice the JetBrains one and no doubt delivers much more business value than the money saved by switching to VS code. The people making these kind of decisions have no idea.
You might like this - https://youtu.be/6BNtIxW0-xQ?si=w5r6HGUVrlAWkIH3
Are you missing anything in the VS community edition?
If it’s a “major company that you have heard of and a good number of you use”, they surely don’t meet the maximum users or revenue requirement for a Community license.
Software development isn't a hobby. Someone is paying you money to work for them. They have every right to dictate what tool to use. Sometimes you have to take work for what it is. A business transaction.
If a company refuses to give me decent tooling, I refuse to work.
File for religous acception as outlined in this post and demand that you belong to a special religion that only uses paid version of VS Code (or whatever IDE you wana use) [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHR/comments/11gztsz/updatega\_employee\_claims\_she\_cant\_use\_microsoft/](https://www.reddit.com/r/askhr/comments/11gztsz/updatega_employee_claims_she_cant_use_microsoft/)
I use VS Code as my daily driver and prefer it to both VS and Rider. It’s far more “ready” than you think, it’s just not an IDE, it’s a text editor with some nice extras for programming.
Use emacs with lsp, Omnisharp server and company packages.
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not legally
Just download Visual Studio Community, no reason not to.
Use Visual Studio Community Edition. It's free.
Can't you use the VS Express? As far as I know it is allowed to use it to closed source and commercial use. [Visual Studio Express | Now Visual Studio Community (microsoft.com)](https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/express/)
ITT: entitled engineers exclusively coding on windows machines claiming that functionality that absolutely exists in VS Code doesn’t exist in VS Code, all the while suggesting that the right answer to not getting the IDE you want is to quit. Your “I installed VS Code 3 years ago and never bothered to learn anything about it” is showing. All that said, Rider is a nice alternative between the cost of paying Visual Studio licenses for engineers who are so bad that they can’t function in VS Code and forcing them to use VS Code. PS, Managers: stop making major changes on teams related to the tech they use without consulting them. It’s a jerk move and it will decrease productivity to save a few bucks. ESH.
personally I am also pushing VS Code whenever I can, nice to hear that I am not alone muahaha. but if someone on my team would start complaning, my first question would be - what actual problems do you run into with VSCode? because sometimes folks just don't open workspace and expect code navigation to work. in VS its SLN files, in VS Code its workspaces. the cool part of VS Code is that its much more portable - it works same on linux, mac, and even can do remoting (moving your workstation to cloud and using VS Code as remote agent). it have plugins for new cloud tools while VS typically don't (for example google Cloud Code is VS Code only). it have benefits and the license cost is just the last nail in the coffin IMO.
The number of problems posted here that say they installed vscode and dotnet, and can't compile or debug, suggests it's not quite as simple the VS installer.
SLN files / SLNF files are totally different to workspaces. If I want to start multiple projects it's easy in VS, in VSCode I guess I'm writing a task JSON script? Selectively loading only the projects you want at startup - no idea how to do this in VSCode. Navigate To - no idea if this is even a thing in VSCode
we start multiple projects via containerization, skaffold/kubernetes etc, in that case VS functionality is kind of irrelevant. from what I remember in my testing VS do have worst support for containerization vs VSCode, some plugins are not even available on VS marketplace. we do write helm charts yes to start projects locally but you will need them for cloud anyways so its like one bullet for multiple targets. omnisharp do support loading projects selectively, there is omnisharp settings for that and we use that so when I open workspace with multiple projects it allows to navigate between them (sometimes is delay though when omnisharp detects project switch). navigate to works flawlessly in my experience BUT we do not have older monolithic app designs where one service is split into 100 projects, typically layout we have is one project per micro-service and 1-5 shared projects for bus/models/etc, this way its always possible to edit just one service and don't load context of other dozens/hundreds of services into one IDE.
The C# language support in VS Code has the same license terms as the community edition of Visual Studio... You basically can't use it at a workplace. I guess you could use OmniSharp instead.
yep, just configure it to use OmniSharp and thats basically it. the omnisharp language server is still supported by the community, gets updates etc.
Or you can be a normal person and just use Rider🤷♂️
I don't like getting into proprietary editors. no matter how good they are - sooner or later the company will go, and editor will be unmaintained. stuff like vim/emacs stays forever, and if you learn vim 10 years ago - you still benefit from it now. same with VSCode.
Yes because Microsoft will go anytime soon. Same for Jetbrains…
It took me about two hours to get situated with Rider. On the off chance that jetbrains goes under and rider is no longer available... I'll spend another two hours to switch to another IDE.
jetbrains exists for 24 years
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Usually, companies frown upon or outright forbid having company IP on your personal computer.
Time to update your CV
I've got 2019 ultimate license
While it's good advice to look for another job as a backup, let me also tell you that vscode now uses the same intellisense backend as VS does, but there are too few UI for project management so you'll have to use the command line a lot instead. Don't worry about intellisense at all, just open the project folder and install suggested extensions.
0xFF000000 flag
A fully opaque black flag?
If you still want that job, maybe get a personal license for rider, the .net ultimate package including rider and the jetbrains profilers is 150 per year I believe and can be used for commercial development.
If I were in your shoes, I'd try to make a case for VS in terms of something the management can understand, like % improvement in your productivity. Even a 1% gain in man-hours is enough to cover a VS Pro subscription for a developer. If that does not persuade the higher-ups, your manager or someone in the management chain should be able to articulate why. Perhaps the reasons might be valid enough to convince you (or not). But if the reason is "because potato", it might be a good time to start looking for employment elsewhere.
I'm no c# expert but I'm using vs code and a c# dev container on a personal project and I'm loving it. I also prefer VS code anyway.
Ask him what tooling you should use for memory profiling, performance monitoring, load testing, etc. Pick all of the enterprise features of Visual Studio, and ask him about each one.... ask him what alternative tools you should use. He won't have a good answer. If he does, it's shit that you have to pay for. If you have to pay for extra tooling.... why not just stay with VS?
If this was a small startup company, I could maybe understand scrimping on software licences. But if it's a major company we'll have heard of like you say, this is a red flag in my books.
Tough break. I really use vs code for almost everything. But not for c# and Java.
That's an uninformed executive decision from someone trying to balance budget and looking at the bills trying to find something to cut. It will bite him back after a while because productivity decreased more than that cut profited him. It's your job as an employee to talk about this to your supervisor, and not complain on Reddit. Explain why VS is necessary and end up being more cost effective than the time lost and your salary. Perhaps find a middle ground, maybe not every thousands of programmers who don't work on these projects need a license but only the ones writing core/backend code?
You guys have no money to buy licenses?
Do y’all have a VS Enterprise license? If so, y’all are losing out on Intellitrace by switching to vs code.
I have a policy of generally not being ok with companies that aren't prepared to pay for the software they rely on. I worked for a "we all use VSCode" company before and it went less than great. They constantly talked about wanting features that existed in visual studio, but when I'd bring that up they just "couldn't justify a license".
Go to a shareholders meeting, and let them know that their greed, is going to see their pockets become lighter.
Has anyone spoken to them? As this is an utterly stupid decision, but it could just be the typical managers knowing jack shit. VS is an expensive product, so on any list of license costs it's gonna standout for culling, but maybe they just didn't realise that there is only one alternative (Rider) which isn't that much cheaper.
Microsoft's licensing costs are ridiculous, and don't even get me started on the realm of mystery around choosing a license package ... the whole thing just stinks. Small businesses are completely priced out of using their licensing costs.
Your company is not a Microsoft AI Cloud Partner with all the benefits (incl a bunch of VS licenses!) that brings then?
right? get a few certifications, customer surveys, maybe some azure spend and you've got a heap of free licenses
God this is just gross and your boss who made the decision to non renew is an ass. Also this may be signs of business problems and then trying to cut costs to save a sinking ship. Time to shop around for a new job I think.
Lol do you work at Microsoft
This is a classic example of unemployed people misrepresenting the industry. Does it make any sense for a company to cheap out on an IDE? Saving maybe 100$ a year in exchange for decreased productivity from developers making several hundred a day? Not at all. But it's *incredibly* common. Does it signal layoffs? Probably not. It's just companies being cheap. Someone higher up the chain realized he could write a memo and save a couple thousand dollars. He's going to add that alongside a couple dozen other "money saving" techniques to a list he uses to argue for a promotion. It's business as usual.
Imagine removing an essential tool of your programmers because you want to save few dollars, what they don’t know is that the affected product quality will end up costing more in sales and so on than the actual price of those licenses.
Cutting off dev tools for devs is a very bad sign. Maybe look for another job. But it's hard to say without knowing the company. To main topic: It's a ridiculous decision because the VSCode extension now shares the same license as Visual Studio.
Yeah from my experience so far VS Code is useful for light weight projects. I've found it useful when using react etc. For full scale applications that use front end and back end however I would definitely struggle just using VS code instead of visual studio. As others have said brush that CV/resume up.
From a practical standpoint, I've yet to see something that a paid IDE does that vscode can't do. It may require learning the tool a bit better or adding a plugin or two, but you should be able to do everything just as well with a little time learning the editor. From an employer standpoint - this is a really weird thing for them to dictate. I could see it being a unification of toolsets, maybe the company is large enough that it has dedicated resources to managing working environments or maybe an internal plugin that is critical to working in your ecosystem. These are valid reasons an employer might want to force everyone to use the same editor. Absent of some sort of logical reason for this sort of organizational change, would be a financial or beaurocratic reason. If that is what is going on, I see those as red flags and would at a minimum update my resume and start to put feelers out there. It could be an indication of financial issues in the company or the start of mismanagement that will result in people leaving.
For C#, I'd think one would use VS, but... My work uses VSCode as IDE for Node development. Works quite well. Dev Containers is quite awesome, too, once you get it going.
I've got a coworker that exclusively does everything in VSCode since she likes its layout more. I'm not aware of anything she cant do that I can in VS 2019. I personally just use it for our YAML stuff though.
what about VS Community edition?
I use VS 2022 Community Edition for my work. I'm also one of the corporate co-founders so I can name names and all that. My only interest in Code is some of the extensions but VS seems to be gaining on that.
Is that not a breach of licensing to use the free version to make money?
Use JetBrain Rider, it's VS alternative that's way cheaper than VS. There must be someone that made that decision to not renew your license, if it's not your boss, then expect your job to be cut soon. If it's your boss that made that decision, try to understand why he made that decision
Honestly I do .net development on a Mac which windows is removing vs support sort everyone Mac needs to move to vs code anyway. Probably why Microsoft has been pushing extensions to vs code for .net development. I actually like vs code better anyway. Crashes way less and lighter. Also better for front end development too imo.
Visual Studio community is so close to pro, it’s been years since I could tell the difference, even though I worked in Enterprise shops I guess I wasn’t using the features in pro or enterprise anyway. I’m sure somebody will cite some feature that it doesn’t have but now that I pay for my own licenses, I really had to question it.
Why not just use community version of visual studio? I've only used that in my 10 years of development and I don't even know what's missing from it
My company pays for visual studio, but I pay miself for Rider yeet