Well, my experiment with VSCode has come to an end for now.
I have been using it exclusively on my laptop for the last 2 months. I used my small hard drive as an excuse to uninstall Visual Studio. Total immersion was the goal.
After these 2 months, I am going back to Visual Studio. VSCode is cool and does some neat things. However, the quality of life features Visual Studio and ReSharper provide are too much to ignore. For example:
- New .cs files in VSCode are created completely blank. Having to type the namespace and class declarations every time is a chore. TDD compounds this since creating test classes doubles this work.
- ReSharper is extremely helpful when creating variables. The IntelliSense will show you possible types as you are typing even if you have not included the appropriate using statement yet.
- Speaking of using statements, ReSharper will add these automatically in a lot of situations.
- I know the keyboard shortcuts for Visual Studio. The biggest one is Alt-Enter, which automatically fixes some things for you, like the above using statement issue. There may be a shortcut for that in VSCode but I couldn’t find it.
- The IntelliSense in Visual Studio just seems to work better, especially with ReSharper. It is especially smarter when suggesting variable names.
While none of these issues are huge in and of themselves, they stack up to make a more frustrating situation that I am willing to deal with right now. They cause me to think too much about my tools instead of being able to focus exclusively on the problem I am trying to solve.
I wish that JetBrains would release ReSharper for VSCode. That would alleviate most of my problems. However, they have stated this will not happen, since they are focused on their own IDE, Rider.
At this point, I think the only way I would use VSCode again is if I get a Mac. Of course this is a possibility since a Mac is required for iOS app development. But for now, it’s back to Visual Studio.