Thank goodness that VSCode is a different experience! VS and Rider are a pain in the ass to setup and maintain and VSCode provides the essential UX better than just about anything else at this time.

I can have VSCode installed and running with my personal settings on any OS within 2 minutes flat. I don't have to find a secret license key, login with any account, or pick through a list of 100 features in the installer. Then, once it's installed, well VSCode is just a better experience for the basic act of editing source code. Multiple cursors, quickly opening files by typing the name (without having to type a greater than sign followed by a space first every time like you do in VS), sane default keyboard shortcuts for managing/splitting documents and so on... Plus, it's got way better facilities for working with front-end web code than VS ever had and some other major features such as remote editing oh and one other little thing: it's fully cross-platform.

And that's the reason for VSCodes wild success. Let's hope Microsoft never fucks it up by trying to glom the rest of their Azure/Microsoft Account crap onto it too much.

Luckily, I don't have to work on anything that needs a designer anymore, like WinForms, but if I did I would certainly install VS. Even then - I think I'd only use VS for the designer and go back to VSCode for everything else. (And I love Windows and I used to love VS, having used both of them for 30 years and 15 years respectively.)

But the VSCode team also covered a lot of ground faster than VS ever did, adding feature after feature. So, what do you want for C#? I'm certain that we'll be getting it soon.

> Luckily, I don't have to work on anything that needs a designer anymore, like WinForms, but if I did I would certainly install VS. Even then - I think I'd only use VS for the designer and go back to VSCode for everything else. (And I love Windows and I used to love VS, having used both of them for 30 years and 15 years respectively.)

The WinForms designer is wonderful. I can throw up an ugly CRUD app that works so insanely fast with it. The web-equivalents are horrible. Everyone is trying to make a rich web app to write rich web apps and IMHO they are all targeting way too low on the "technical ability" scale for their users.

Though web is harder, since apps need to be responsive, and cross plat, and automating code gen of CSS that does that cannot be easy, and having a form designer UI expose settings for how a UI resizes itself doesn't sound like a UX challenge I'd want to tackle.

>Thank goodness that VSCode is a different experience! VS and Rider are a pain in the ass to setup and maintain and VSCode provides the essential UX better than just about anything else at this time

I find it's the opposite. VSCode is just a very barebones editor with an ecosystem of plugins that may or may not be maintained. I always need to search through a list of hundreds of plugins to figure out which ones I need for this particular techstack.

I started using Rider this year and it's been much, much better than VS and VSCode for me. I can use it in both Windows and Linux. Search experience in Rider is my favorite part of the UX. I find VSCode clunky in comparison.

I use VSCode when doing Vue stuff. I like it for that. But I still miss the nice search UX of Rider. Maybe I need to dive deeper to see if there is a setting or another plugin that can get me that same feeling.

I've been using VSCode for C# daily for a year or two. I'm considering switching to a non-electron editor because of how slow and sluggish it is, including IntelliSense, refactoring, syntax highlighting and the latency and frame rate of actual rendering (huge drain on the battery if you have one). The editor doesn't (seem to) support language-integrated syntax highlighting, so no ambiguous language features get recognized and there's plenty of bugs (such as with around the C#7 ValueTuple syntax feature). The C# extension tends to freeze a couple of times a day. One feature that excels out of nowhere is the search functionality which greps entire folders almost instantly, probably because the functionality is delegated to a separate (native, I presume) process. JSON-with-schema-based configuration is something more software should have. The editor also starts pretty fast but most features are delegated to extensions which load (ultra)lazily and aren't usable for a few (5-30) seconds.

Just curious: are you on a Mac or Windows? I never experienced any freezing at all on Linux.

Windows, although my experience with VSCode on Ubuntu wasn't very smooth or stable either (worked with TypeScript for a few months a while ago).

I use VSCode with C# extension. THe only thing I missed was the additional analysis and quick fixes that full VS provides. However, that got sorted out by installing Roslynator in VS Code (works on linux too) and I couldn't be happier.