I ran a poll on my LinkedIn and Twitter profiles recently wondering if Rider or Visual Studio was used more?
After a total of nearly 3,500 votes we can see Visual Studio is a used a lot more. A lot of this might be down to the fact that Visual Studio has a free community edition and that many organisations have volume licenses in place for Visual Studio Professional and Enterprise editions.
There could also be a platform element to the results below as Rider seems to be particularly popular on Mac as Visual Studio for Mac is relatively undercooked compared to the Windows version.
While Rider has a loyal fanbase, Visual Studio has improved dramatically over the last year or so in terms of it’s refactoring ability, so the ‘need’ to switch to Rider has reduced I feel.
Note … I deliberately didn’t include Visual Studio Code as while it’s an amazing tool it’s more of an editor and doesn’t have full debugging capabilities when compared to VS or Rider.
