> It’s very hard not to roll my eyes when I read this.
It's not as good as Visual Studio proper but Microsoft has put a lot of effort making C# work well in a variety of editors. VS Code, VS for mac, VS Community Edition are all free to use and I'd argue that any of them offer a better experiences than you'd get with a lot of other languages. Rider is my IDE for C# now, macOS and Windows, so I'm having a hard time buying your argument that Microsoft is trying to aggressively protect this particular turf.
This is my exact fear when someone suggests I involve myself in MS tooling. I'm sure they can get it to work for themselves. They might even be happy. After battling with bloat and installing garbage, then being prompted to pay and sign away privacy...
Surely many people are happy with that. Good for them. What is right for them might not be right for me.
For my sanity I don't even want to try. How many times do I need to be burned. "This time is different", fine maybe it is. I'll never find out if MS has really reformed for the better.
> And it works (mostly) flawlessly.
It’s very hard not to roll my eyes when I read this.
No it doesn’t. It’s not mostly flawless, it’s slightly better than using notepad.
It’s considerably worse than the general experience of using vscode.
This has been gone over many times in the past, and I would put it as my #1 c# myth:
1) you can just use vscode
Microsoft has made a business decision to cripple the c# support in vscode to prop up their visual studio division.
It doesn’t “happen to no be as good yet but it’s getting better”.
It will never be a first class c# experience until the business priorities at Microsoft change.
It’s free. So is the visual studio community edition; honestly, if you have to use c# just use that.