this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Is Rider that great? (self.csharp)
submitted 1 year ago by angrysaki to c/csharp
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I'm partly just posting this to get some more content going here...

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

The Pros:

--IdeaVim is better than VsVim

--Feels a bit snappier

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

Cons:

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

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

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

--Doesn't work with WinForms

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

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[–] StudioLE 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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

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

[–] angrysaki 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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

[–] StudioLE 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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

[–] angrysaki 2 points 1 year ago

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

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

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

[–] kogasa 1 points 1 year ago

Visual Studio is quite these days snappy (maybe not quite as fast as Rider, but not much worse) but ReSharper makes it way slower.

[–] douglasg14b 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If it helps, I've been a visual studio user for the last 9 years.

In order to better support non-C# devs onboarding to C# (who where mostly on Mac, and vs for Mac is terrible) I switched to Rider 6 months ago, so we are using the same IDE and I can help them out.

Holy crap, it's good. There are a few things that aren't quite as nice (no more intellicode, stack traces are kinda shitty), but after fixing some garbage default settings, it's turned into a pretty good IDE.

The visual studio debugger is still better though.

[–] nibblebit 2 points 1 year ago

Completely agree that VS is way more powerful than Rider. It is kept up to date and has excellent tools for new tech like Blazer hot reloads and Maui designer. The debugger is the most powerful way to debug code.

I still use Rider, because I use JetBrains ide's for all my projects and I can run it on Windows Mac and Linux. When I hit a speed bump or want to go fast or try a new feature, i swap to VS :p

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

Well people using rider mostly also adding bunch of tools. Rider are well known on avalonia UI designer and it's very supporter.

VS is better for debugging, I do agree.. And there are vs code with dev net toolkit. It's powerful and useful.. I'm much loving vs code than the full blown IDE. 😂

[–] crystelium 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I swapped to using Rider about 4-5 years ago now, back when visual studio's refactoring tools just weren't quite as good. Since then, because I've learnt all of the keybindings, the layout and I've just generally become familiar with rider I've never swapped back. I'm actually not sure how caught-up visual studio is these days as I've not even bothered to look. Since it also has dotmemory and dotpeek support, it also just makes life easier for me.

As a side note, I'm pretty sure the watch window is a list of variables and you can just add to it? (Not got my PC / rider open right now, so can't check to be honest)

[–] angrysaki 1 points 1 year ago

The issue I have with the watch window is that I want to have 2 watch windows side by side, so i can compare to separate variables side by side. For Rider I find i have to use the locals window as one of my watches which is often really cumbersome.

Honestly, what I really want is an IDE tool to give me some sort of "diff" of objects while debugging, but the 2 separate watch windows is the best I've found.