I've been using Xamarin Forms a lot in the last 3 years or so and I like the framework. However, Visual Studio for Mac is a royal pain in the ass. I wonder if this is just my experience (maybe some weird config settings in my project or something) or if many people feel the same.

I use a 3.4 GHz Quad-Core i5 iMac with 24 GB of memory. Storage is a Fusion Drive. On this configuration Visual Studio often slows down to a crawl doing whatever it does.

I've recently switched to JetBrains Rider [0] and the experience is so much better. Rider never slows down for me. Occasionally the debugger disconnects, but just closing and re-opening the project fixes this issue most of the time. The key binds take a bit of getting used to.

To improve my experience in Visual Studio the few times that I am forced to use it, I'm moving my view code mostly to C# files (not making use of XAML anymore). Since the XAML editor is also very often slow to autocomplete and such in Visual Studio.

So with Rider, I now have a good experience. Sadly Rider is not free, but it's also not very expensive and my developer experience has improved in a big way. Rider also gives much better advise for refactoring, which is also a nice bonus.

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[0]: https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/