I’m curious to know what IDEs people out there use. But before anyone tell me what their IDE of choice is, I’ll give you mine and how I work. An IDE is a very personal choice, I think. I mean, at my current company we have people who use wildly different IDEs even for the same projects. I don’t think you can constrain someone to use an IDE they don’t want to. One of my last workplaces, one of the team leads was so familiar with Vim and so used to textual commands that he never really used any IDE like visual studio.
Caveat
I’m a .NET developer. So, my choice of IDE is likely not what you’d choose as a Java developer, or as a pure front-end developer, your tools might be slightly different too. You definitely should base your IDEs around what your main development experience will be like. If you’re a Java developer – you might be using IntelliJ, Netbeans, or even Eclipse. If you’re a frontend developer, you might be comfortable with Notepad++, Sublime, or Webstorm. But again, I’m a .NET developer, so I’ll be talking about my .NET IDEs.
C# Development
To be honest, I don’t think you’ll find many people using something other than Visual Studio for C#/.NET Development. It has so many features built-in and is just an easy-to-use tool. I top off my Visual Studio with Resharper, although with the new Roslyn compiler this might become less relevant. Now, for those of you not in-the-know, there’s a new IDE in town that hopes to take away a share from the Microsoft market. Rider. Rider is kind of like Visual Studio with Resharper built-in because it’s made by the guys who made Resharper. It’s pretty cool, but there are still some small things that make me default to Visual Studio. Although, in the coming years, it’ll be interesting to see how it’s progressing.
TypeScript Development
We’re object orientated guys with a slice of functional. So, TypeScript is a language we’re easily fluent in. For my TypeScript development, I tend to use Visual Studio Code. It’s not a full-on editor like Visual Studio, but it’s great with a few extensions. It picks up tslint errors and helps with autocomplete. I have used WebStorm in the past (because of its tools that help with refactoring and autocomplete), but since Visual Studio Code is free, that’s the one I prefer. Also, the community seems pretty active with VS Code, so I’m pretty happy with my choice.
What about you?
I’d like to hear what others are using for any of their development environments. You never know what you’re missing. A development environment should be personal (it’s also based on what your company is willing to pay for). I don’t expect every .NET developer to use Visual Studio. There could be other awesome IDEs out there that I’ve never heard of. Please don’t hesitate to comment on your preferences.
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