I downloaded Unity 5.3 the other day. The installer managed to sneak in installing Visual Studio and setting it up as my default code editor.
Anyway today I decided I was about ready to actually start writing some code in 5.3. I opened the editor. And visual studio pops up. Being generally lazy I decide to give it a go, rather then take the 30 seconds to google how to get MonoDevelop to come back.
I was pleasantly surprised. The IDE was pretty easy to pick up. It seems to know what I want. And it seems to have this general ability to ignore typos as I make them. Plus it seems to integrate with Unity far better then MonoDevelop ever did. Console errors, warnings and debugs are right there in the IDE with me. Compile error messages are pointed out directly as I make them. Tool tips are everywhere. There is even the little light bulb that pops up and points out possible problems.
Anyway, after a couple hours of coding I’m now hooked. I apologize profusely for every time I said MonoDevelop was more then enough to meet my needs.
I’m usually pretty platform agnostic and generally not a windows fanboy even though it is my main development machine. I also have OSX, linux machines, and other OSes and certainly am familiar with all. Microsoft usually has better competitors in most spaces but in IDEs they have always been #1 in my book.
I have always been a huge Visual Studio fan even 15+ years ago. At least for me it has stood the test of time and I’ve never encountered any IDE that comes close. I’ve used Eclipse, Xcode, Android Studio, Titanium, command line tools, embedded IDEs (csstudio or IAR workbench), lighter text editors, Borland, etc. It was worth it even back in the day when the free version didn’t have all the features that community does (community I find just as good as the paid version that my previous employer always provided). To be honest debugging has always been the main portion of VS that sets it apart from the rest it was always reliable whether I was debugging over the network or local it seemed to be much more solid than the alternatives.
VS snuck up on me too. I’ve maybe written 5 lines of code in so far. As I’ve mentioned in the past, a particularly difficult client just has me seriously burnt out on coding right now. I can barely stand to look at Unity. So my past few weeks have been spent creating graphics. As of now, I don’t hate VS, but I don’t like it either. I simply don’t have enough experience to say. I tend to find IDEs mostly the same. Some are better than others. I like XCode better than Monodevelop. But they all suffer from that annoyance that autocomplete is super terrific when it helps you and super annoying when it hinders you. Unless VS does something particularly egregious I’ll probably stay with it. Mostly because I’m too lazy to figure out how to switch back. Hopefully it will pleasantly surprise me too.
My opinion may not matter much though. Until 2009 when I had to use XCode, I refused to use any IDE. I was a text editor and command line kinda guy. Since then, I do appreciate some of what IDEs do. But, like auto complete, it all seems hit or miss.
Me not understanding VS and not getting it to work with C++ for UE4 was the reason I tried unity. Would be a bit ironic if I switched to VS now, but it is a possibility. C# seemed to work back then. Can anyone tell me how easy it is to switch back to Mono if VS doesn’t work out for me? If I know I can get back then I’ll give VS a go too.
Aside from an issue where I can’t seem to get .net 3.5 to work (I need to reformat and reinstall windows 7 because something is corrupt and I don’t know if I even have a key), the only problems I’m having are VS formatting code behind my back (like turning tabs into spaces) and the fact that it’s 2015 and it still can’t figure out to use whatever line ending is already there.
Thank you! Now I can finally find out which of the licenses that I have I need to use for a reinstall. I was fearing I might run into problems if by accident I run the same license on 2 computers simultaneously.
Actually I had somewhat similar problems when I tried to use VS for C#.
There’s one unfixable auto-formatting option that can’t be turned off, and VS routinely messes up line endings. In the end I decided to stick with monodevelop, despite monodevelop being a buggy mess.
VS is still #1 IDE for C++, though, despite microsoft’s continuous attempts to ruin it.
