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Discussion on: Have you ever tried any JetBrains product?

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Thomas • Edited

I'm using WebStorm as my default IDE for all javascript-projects. It's very satisfying for me that it has a whole bunch of features but the UI is not overloaded with several buttons and toolbars. So everything seems clear and its easy to find my tools.

For a Xamarin-App I started to use Visual Studio for Mac but neither the UI is attractive nor the features could convince me. I switched to Rider and now I'm using it for all my .NET-projects. Surprising to me, that using Rider for a Xamarin is more fun than VS for Mac, since VS Mac's origin is Xamarin Studio.
But I have to admit that I was convinced mainly by the better features and completions in the C#-Code and the better unit test-suite, so the overall workflow is more neatless. All other neccessary and specific tools for Xamarin work as expected (hot-reload, formatting, emulator-connection,...).

The benefit over VS Code for me is the quality of plugins in JetBrains IDEs. All plugins that I used, did exactly what I was expecting. The marketplace doesn't seem as huge, but the quality in general is nice.
Against Visual Studio for Windows I don't see any disadvantages with Rider. Everything I need, I found in a reasonable place or could be installed via plugin.

Even the pricing is absolutely fine and fair. You are not trapped into a weird subscription and you can choose which products you need (more than 2 products, then all-products-pack might be the best choice). JetBrains doesn't give you features that you don't need but let you pay for it. For me, it's quite important to have a transparent pricing model for my default and most important software tool.

It's also unusual that JetBrains doesn't make a difference between private and commercial license. That does give me the opportunity to use my private license in commercial projects, even if my employer only gives me Visual Studio.