Microsoft Visual Studio

“When Visual Studio (not VSCode) incorporated a time travel debugger, that felt like a major advance in an IDE.”

“There are good use cases for staying within full-fat VS's capability set (drivers, among other things)”

“Windows-native tools like Visual Studio, WiX, MSI etc. make it nice and easy to vendor your own DLLs.”

“Visual Studio as the IDE for building windows client apps, especially WinForms, was and still is a genuinely incredible and productive experience.”

“when you really need to get down into debugging some engine level crash, I'll take VS over Rider every time”

“With Visual Studio and Photino, after some tweaking I managed to publish everything in a single .exe file.”

“Visual Studio around 2010 was absolutely horrible for building web based applicatons, with common freezes and input lags.”

“Debugging tools and code navigation in a proper IDE like Visual Studio or JetBrains Rider is totally different development experience”

“Visual Studio's C++ debugger is still one of the best, and the tooling elsewhere hasn't caught up yet”

“Mature workflows for those kinds of tasks have been mostly ubiquitous across professional-grade engineering tools”

“CE7 platform builder is just extension to stock VS2008. And it doesn't really do much, just few treeviews for selecting components.”

“Building applications for WinCE 6 was also only supported with Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, which put a hard cap on available language features”

“They made many other apps that ignored or duplicated core UI paradigms too. Visual Studio, Encarta, Windows Media Player”

“its tooling is an outsider for Visual Studio, where everything else is shared between Visual Basic and C#”

“everything you needed to move forward with development was available from the moment you opened Visual Studio”

“my licensed Visual Studio 2026 that's supposed to be for serious-face commercial development is rife with Copilot.”

“I ran Visual Studio 4, not an app, but an entire app factory, on a 66MHz 486 with 16MB RAM. And it was snappy.”

“I did not like its architecture and focus on GUI at the expense of everything else, but I still saw it as a consistent framework”

“Visual Studio may be the best product Microsoft has ever made. Compared to the rest of their offerings, it is nothing short of amazing.”

“navigate a maze of checkboxes, hunting for which “Workloads” or “Individual Components” contain the actual compiler”

“the .vsconfig import/export way of handling Visual Studio components has worked well for the large teams I'm on”

“every time, the new version of VS has a bug in the install somewhere that changes something that breaks old projects”

“I could straight-up call functions from the Visual Studio debugger Watch window instead of editing and recompiling”

“VS, for comparison, lags a few seconds when searching files, and it misses files that are not imported into the workspace.”

“Debuggers worked and did impressive things (time travel debugging! Rewind your entire program state!”

“Professional awesome native tools (Office, Affinity series, Directory Opus, Visual Studio, AutoHotkey,...)”

“being able to do graphics development with modern graphics APIs that don't require a bazillion of code lines, with debuggers”

“Some of us like the experience of Visual Studio, being able to do graphics development with modern graphics APIs”

“visual studio used to be great back in the day because it was really thoughtfully designed and everything was nicely integrated”

“I've been able to build up two decades worth of muscle memory because the product has been very consistent over my career.”

“Having the ability to have things like method auto-completion, go-to-definition and symbol renaming is a net productivity gain”

“It was so rushed out, that many of the dialog windows on the new settings pane show tiny VS 2022 settings dialogs as popups.”

“If you haven't programmed in Visual Studio or used WinDbg then you have not used a serious, high-end debugger.”

“Visual Studio 6 itself was pretty OK actually. Like the UI was very limited (but therefore also fast enough)”

“going from C# with full visual studio (having a compiler with a lot of information about your code)”

“IMHO opinion, if you you want to develop using c# you are best of using windows because of better tooling”

“It's still the slowest IDE, but I suppose they deserve props for making it better than the Windows 95 speeds of the last version.”

“It has some neat UI features (like CLI arguments in the toolbar) but I dislike the Windows 11 UI design and this is just... more of that.”

“In c# I can evaluate complex linq data transformation in watch window in visual studio during debug, at fly.”

“I am all good for nice completion on VS, or help decypher compiler errors, but lets do this AI push with some contention.”