Rider

I haven't used VS in quite a while as well. This is just quick thoughts, might be missing some things, this is just what came immediately to mind, I might edit this later:

Pros:

• I personally like the source control manager, especially the diff feature where instead of having + - lines below each other, you visually see the before and after code and where those lines went
• the UI is way less cluttered with stuff (at least it feels that way and that's important).
• I really like the way you can switch projects when you have multiple windows opened, that's really useful when I study a new codebase and have to switch from one project very often. It just finds the window where that project is opened and brings it forward
• this might be just getting used to it thing but I like jetbrains' code launcher (run/debug/specific config) way more than VS
• I haven't used VS with databases but I REALLY like the way rider's (and JB in general) works. Double click database table to get a quick select with easy WHERE and TOP inputs, you click and edit specific field, add/remove rows and then inspect+submit that query and edit the database without writing a line of sql (which you still can do if you want)

Cons:

• I had some troubles with the templates where I was missing stuff that VS had (the only example right now I have is standalone react app with .esproject). This might be a skill issue but I feel the getting of custom templates should be easier and more straightforward
• there are definitely more cons, I just can't think of any new ones right now, I will edit this comment if I can think of them

Misc?:

• jetbrains have for the most part (the whole ai hype) very customer friendly pricing policies
  • fallback licences
  • student/FOSS devs have free licences for non-commercial stuff
  • ALL IDEs for the price of two It could be considered kinda expensive. I personally don't mind, mostly because I really enjoy all the value that rider provides for me

I wrote this thing on phone, I have no idea if it's readable lol

Faster is 90% of the reason for me. It's just so much more smoother, i can find things faster and do things faster. ButI also use a lot of the developing features, creating/converting properties, functions and such. Probably also in VS but i'm not that used to them. I'm also used to quickly jumping around in the code by going to definitions. Rider is nicer here, because VS is clunky and feel like there is two system competing to do that in VS with Resharper. Not to mention the stutters and slow program.

I like the git integration better in Rider. I think VS solved it, but selecting a remote branch wasn't actually getting you that branch before you pulled the changes manually. To the point where i pushed a brand new branch, someone else selected that in VS, and when they ran the build it didn't work at all because it didn't have all the changes?? It also did not auto-fetch, so it showed you were up to date with the remote despite not being... Apart from that, it makes swapping branches a lot easier. VS gets angry with uncommited changes. And while i wasn't a huge fan of the new diff view, diffs without newline changes and such is a killer feature, especially for someone that got a new editorconfig but not the entire codebase refactored... (because, too busy to do such a large change)

The biggest downside to Rider is hot-reloading of XAML. Rider does not support that for .NET at least. It's a bit of a bummer since VS allows some very rapid iteration solving layouting issues.

Just the last week, I have had memory issues where Rider eats up to 10 GB of ram and then starts stuttering after being open for more than a day. I just installed the latest update that hoepfully fixed that. Rider also sometimes just decides not to run one or more programs in a multi-launch config, particularly the first time after starting. That's a bit annyoing.

I do not really like the database integration, but we also have a stupid oracle database and the way to handle that is a whole other story.

I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure the individual licenses for jetbrains products (the ide's at least) can be used for commercial purposes.

It's just that the license is tied to you as a person and not a general "seat" license for the company. You also can't pay for it with company funds directly.

On the VS side the community edition is free for commercial use provided there are less than 250 pc's (doesn't specify what a pc is exactly but i shouldn't think it's a worry for you) and the company makes less than $1 million dollars.

To see if the community edition does what you need to can check the official comparison chart : https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/compare/

IIRC Rider is all the same version regardless of license type.