Migrating a project from Visual studio to Rider

Alec Clark — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 11:57:33 +0000

I have been dabbling with Rider and JetBrains throughout my career and finally made the full plunge for my personal projects. So far these are the things that I wish I knew about or quickly ran into an issue with due to a feature being in a slightly different location.

Learning about the ide

I immediately appreciated the simple introduction to using the IDE. There were a lot of features that I haven't used when dabbling and I'm not sure that exists in Visual Studio 2022. When opening the IDE for the first time there is a popup asking if you would like to learn about the IDE. You can always access this later by looking for the more tools and selecting Learn. This will launch a demo project that walks you through the features. My personal favourite is double-taping shift launches a full search that appears to be quite quick.

I haven't used it in a particularly large project so performance could diminish.

Command Task runner

I was previously using Command Task Runner (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MadsKristensen.CommandTaskRunner) to manage simple tasks. I haven't found a replacement for this but I was able to take advantage of the NPM task view and configure the runcli job to spin up at launch of the project. I haven't noticed any performance differences yet but I haven't done any testing to prove this.

User Secrets

It took me a little time to find the user secrets home in Rider. This is accessible by right clicking the project file, tools and finally .NET User Secrets

Json nesting

I found that by default Rider doesn't have nested a nested view in the explorer tab for the appsettings.{environment}.json files. This is not a deal breaker and all the files are still present. However, I got a little distracted and eventually stumbled onto a blog (https://www.dandoescode.com/blog/rider-automatically-nesting-json-configuration-files) that provided a way to cutomise the file nestings.

In rider open the explorer. Click on the three dots in the top left and select file nesting settings. From here you can add a nesting rule. I have used the following:
.json .Development.json; .Production.json; .Test.json

Conclusion