1y ago

"upgraded" to Visual Studio Pro after using Visual Studio Code for years

I switched because my workplace has licenses for VSPro, and IT doesn't want us grabbing our own stuff off the internet.

What a disappointment! it's worse, and harder to use in almost every way. For the record I'm coding in Python and just need git integration and a debugger.

It's such a step back in design language and usability. Love to ignore free software in favor of its expensive "professional" counterpart

19 comments

That they share a name is misleading as vscode has infinitely more in common with atom than visual studio.
Visual Studio is great for .NET but lmao at trying to use it for python.
Also sucks that you have an IT department that considers the threat model for installing & using the latter as any different than the former.
- That they share a name is misleading as vscode has infinitely more in common with atom than visual studio.
  Still salty they killed the only decent Electron-based editor just to slap the M$ name on it and inject a ton of non-free telemetry.
  
  just to slap the M$ name on it
  Hey now, don't revise history you're not doing their pre-acquisition plagarism justice.

Silly Hexbear, Visual Studio is not an upgraded counterpart of VSCode, Visual Studio is an IDE specialized for C#/Dotnet and C++ development, while VSCode is a general purpose source code editor with wide extension support for different programming languages.
Using Visual Studio for Python is like using VSCode for C#: while it is certainly possible, it would be a lot more difficult than using the proper tool for the job, so you should still stick with VSCode for Python!
- You may have picked a bad example here, Visual Studio has good python support out of the box.

Visual studio isn’t for Python so no wonder you’re having issues. Try pycharm instead of VS anything.
- It sucks for .NET also, I currently waste up to an hour a day switching between different browsers for debugging and restarting the instance, sometimes my whole work laptop if that fails. All my coworkers have equally annoying but apparently unrelated problems, like maybe I could spend a couple days nailing down the issue, my younger self would have, but at this point I just don't have the motivation. It's sad because .NET is actually quite good, C# is a very pretty and expressive language, the compiler is nearly flawless, blazor is... not the worst framework for building a UI, even VS itself has some impressive magic it's just slow and constantly breaks in new and exciting ways no matter what you're using it for
  
  Don't forget having every single major release for the last decade installed because your oldest code bases will only run in VS2015 or whatever.

lol your workplace is incompetent

I'm not a professional coder by any means but even just going from writing up short programs in notepad++ to VS feels disgusting. And I'm talking about all versions and all years. The things you people do for breakpoints is downright degrading. Just the names you have to remember for "folder".
- No idea what language you're talking about here but writing any sort of C# program without an IDE? I'd rather get a tooth extraction without anesthesia.

I’ve been there. I’m not a python dev by trade, but I had to do a lot of python coding while in an Incident Response position for parsing log files from multiple sources before our internal EDR platform added that feature.
VS Pro was miserable. I was issued a 14” 4 core laptop with low clock speeds, and I would be waiting significantly longer than necessary for that bloated IDE to process things, and my usable screen real-estate for code was tiny. It made me miss the neovim setup I had on my personal laptop so much
Thankfully, my boss eventually told me that the allowed software list was larger than what was on the software download portal and I was able to get VS Code and gvim, and I finished that contract with a semi-comfortable setup. If you complain to IT enough, you can probably get a much better IDE.
In the meantime, see if you’re allowed to use jupyter. If you are, you can use the jupyter in browser editor for prototyping and debugging

That really sucks, I hate having to use overengineered garbage. Any half decent text editor, Git and GDB have already fixed 99.5% of our problems, having a bloated IDE that tries to do some of the remaining 0.05% but the core functionality becomes so much harder to access is a huge bummer.

and IT doesn't want us grabbing our own stuff off the internet.
Winblows be like:
For the record I'm coding in Python and just need git integration and a debugger.
That sounds like Juypter notebooks job. Honestly GNU Emacs/Neovim would be enough for that.
That sucks that people will bend over backwards for nonfree software. The software revolution must grow hotter!

I never really equated VS with python, powershell or any “script like” language, that was always the realm of vs.code. The full blown VS on the other hand was designed for .NET, C, creating executables, DLLs or other large scale programs in which you need deep debugging, memory stack and other highly integrated components.
Basically it’s different tools for different jobs. Using VS for python is like using an over engineered power tool to tighten the screw on a wall plate.

VSCODE is better in almost every way IMO, a few projects I started I specifically put VSCODE as the recommended IDE, but many people still associate back-end C# development with VS unfortunately.
My goal is to eventually eliminate the licence costs associated with VS.

Yeah python isn't really a language that visual studio targets. Its mainly for C# or C++ development, which allow for more dedicated tooling beyond just writing code. VSCode is much more suitable for things like python or javascript.
Personally I love Visual Studio. It can be a bit slow in some ways, but the tooling is so good around debugging or running/writing tests. Also refactoring is super easy with it.

For your job you definitely should try to convince them to let you use some combination of Jupyter or iPython with some better and lighter editor like Emacs. Apparently there's a new thing called Lapce. VSOld is just not what you want there, and it's too big for just a debugger and git integration.

Have you considered Pycharm?

19 comments