C# IDE's

For my first language as part of my apprentice is to learn C# language, as I have done Java professionally and learnt Ruby when I was learning Rails for fun.

C# has various available IDEs, below are the ones I conducted a little of research on.

Microsoft Visual Studio

  • Developer - Microsoft
  • Platform(s) Windows
  • License Proprietary & a Community Edition: Freeware is available

I have fond memories of using Visual studio when I use to play around with Visual Basic and if their was a OSX version I would probably be using it. Sadly, that's not the case and I have no intention jumping into the Windows world when my Mac setup fits me like a glove.
I've found this Visual Studio to be quite lacking in features without Resharper installed, features crucial like ReSharper.

ReSharper

  • Developer - JetBrains
  • Platform(s) Windows
  • License - Pay version only

This isn't an IDE per se but a plugin for my favourite IDE for all time(InteliJ). My love for InteliJ runs so deep that I even considered moving to Windows just so I would stay in the realm of a Jetbrains product. I really hope they port this plugin over to OS, this seems unlikely due to ReSharper being dependent on Visual Studio extensions. You never know as Microsoft are becoming more open to cross platform and open source products, which leads us to...

Visual Studio Code

  • Developer - Microsoft
  • Platform(s) - Windows, Mac, Linux
  • Free

One of Microsoft's latest effort in the open source space. I applaud Microsoft effort but I have found this IDE to be very limited.

Vim with OmniSharp

This is the one I was most excited to setup, the power of vim with the power of C#. However my mentor said that it wasn't a straightforward setup. I attempted to set it up myself but found it buggy.
My mentor has a good blog post on this.

link to CJ's blog post

MonoDevelop/Xamarin Studio

  • Developer - Xamarin and the Mono community
  • Platform(s) Windows/OS X, Linux
  • Free

This one was recommended by one of the craftsmen. I like this IDE, it has a lot of potential but sadly that potential is currently hampered by niggling bugs. Small bugs like windows losing focus. NUnit test passing on first run through and then failing on second run through.

I finally settled on Visual Studio with ReSharper which I have been really enjoying, although at times it slows down but this may be because I'm currently running in a Virtual machine.

 

Ced