I loved VS, having used it since it was MSVC.

The UX of VS2013 was the tipping point for me. And they removed macros. Dropped setup projects with no real upgrade path. The direction it moves is what benefits Microsoft.

And the cost has become unjustifiable, now that it's no longer a "must have".

Without ReSharper (which just adds to the bloat), it's primitive (but improving).

The debugger, however, has always been the best I've used.

I think VS is painful.

It's slow to open. It crashes frequently. It's hard to extend. It's absolutely AWFUL on system resources. Its settings are a complete clusterfuck (admittedly, mainly because it tries to be/do absolutely everything).

I also think VS is actually a bad teaching tool for new developers. It simply tries to hand-wave/magic away parts of the system you're working on that REALLY matter. It's like VS is stuck in the era where the idea of opening a configuration file in a text editor is "uncouth". Which is frankly insane, since navigating the frustrating and byzantine guis it throws up instead is an absolute nightmare. Worse, you really need to care about those config files and settings, having them hidden helps nobody.

Basically, I think VS Code is a better IDE (yes, IDE, not editor) in every way. It takes more work to get off the ground, but it's literally miles away a better experience.

Then use VS Code?

But as a .NET developer of over 15 years now I disagree. VS Code is currently using 1,200 MB of ram on my machine while Visual Studio is using 1,700 MB. I have a much larger project open in visual studio. Out of the 64 GB of ram on my machine, this isn't even a factor. What kind of machines are you running on where this is actually a problem?

VMs

VS + Resharper (or better yet + VsVim) is a miles better experience

next on the list after VS would be Rider,

then VScode...

I cannot remember the last time Vs crashed, a bit slower to open, but percentage wise, I spend hardly any time opening it. Extensions are sort of more involved to set up, but it's not that hard to do. It uses a bunch of resources, but I have lots of resources for it, settings don't seem too out of the ordinary, like most things, it just works out of the box and has a deep set of settings to customize it.

Resharper absolutely tanks my performance. Not only does it slow down cold start by ~5x, it introduces input lag on each keystroke. Back in VS2013, R# was indispensable, but with VS2017 the only feature I miss is namespace refactoring. It's also clunky how it gives you effectively two IDEs with two databases mushed into a single window.

I'm trying to wean myself onto VS code now (with vim keybindings), but being forced to stay in a single window is tough to swallow.

I keep being disappointed by performance on InteliJ products.

Maybe because I don't have 16 GB, Xeons with SSD at my disposal?

So far Eclipse and Netbeans still outperform them, unless I turn on laptop mode and disable the majority of plugins.

I have no clue why VS is so bad. You would hope that as a commercial and primary development tool for a company as large as MS, they would be able to make it stable and fast. It's horrible. But so is XCode... I guess both try to cram in too much features and developers will (have to in many cases) use it anyway.