I recently ran across an online ranking of IDEs, and Eclipse is apparently just barely below Visual Studio – you can see the full rankings here:
http://pypl.github.io/IDE.html
As much as I love Visual Studio, especially now that it’s free for individuals in its full form, I just appreciate the look, feel, and layout/interface of Eclipse much more. There is some relief in seeing that number 3, Android Studio, has less than half the share of either Visual Studio or Eclipse.
I recently installed a demo/trial of ReSharper Ultimate – and it’s phenomenal. In just a few hours I was able to apply hundreds of small tweaks and adjustments, improving the quality and readability of my code. It’s almost like having an expert coder sitting next to you, giving tips and insight into the functions and classes.
Another great tool in the Ultimate package is dotCover – a much better test runner than what Visual Studio typically has with NUnit, my unit-testing framework of choice.
Thanks to JetBrains for creating such an amazing tool! This is Visual Studio the way it should be.
Check it out at:
https://www.jetbrains.com/dotnet/