Around two years ago I was on a really small team, just two or three developers, and the other developer decided they wanted us to use Rider. Because I didn’t have a preference, I used Rider and rather enjoyed it. However, that developer has since moved teams and now it is just me (for the time being).
So I was considering moving back to Visual Studio or even switching to Visual Studio Code, but I wanted to see some arguments against this.
Here is my list so far, but it’s probably out of date since I haven’t used Visual Studio in a long time.
Pros of Rider:
- Much faster than using ReSharper
- Less sharp interface with a better font
- I’m used to it at this point
- I have a Nyan cat loading bar which is kind of fun
Cons of Rider:
- Enterprise license is expensive (probably)
- New versions of C# aren’t immediately supported
- Refactorings are becoming less necessary with the rise of AI assistants
- Don’t really like their source control manager
Wanted to hear what other users think. What keeps you using Rider?
Faster is 90% of the reason for me. It’s just so much more smoother, i can find things faster and do things faster. ButI also use a lot of the developing features, creating/converting properties, functions and such. Probably also in VS but i’m not that used to them. I’m also used to quickly jumping around in the code by going to definitions. Rider is nicer here, because VS is clunky and feel like there is two system competing to do that in VS with Resharper. Not to mention the stutters and slow program.
I like the git integration better in Rider. I think VS solved it, but selecting a remote branch wasn’t actually getting you that branch before you pulled the changes manually. To the point where i pushed a brand new branch, someone else selected that in VS, and when they ran the build it didn’t work at all because it didn’t have all the changes?? It also did not auto-fetch, so it showed you were up to date with the remote despite not being… Apart from that, it makes swapping branches a lot easier. VS gets angry with uncommited changes. And while i wasn’t a huge fan of the new diff view, diffs without newline changes and such is a killer feature, especially for someone that got a new editorconfig but not the entire codebase refactored… (because, too busy to do such a large change)
The biggest downside to Rider is hot-reloading of XAML. Rider does not support that for .NET at least. It’s a bit of a bummer since VS allows some very rapid iteration solving layouting issues.
Just the last week, I have had memory issues where Rider eats up to 10 GB of ram and then starts stuttering after being open for more than a day. I just installed the latest update that hoepfully fixed that. Rider also sometimes just decides not to run one or more programs in a multi-launch config, particularly the first time after starting. That’s a bit annyoing.
I do not really like the database integration, but we also have a stupid oracle database and the way to handle that is a whole other story.