Battle of the C# IDEs

VS 2019 vs VS Code vs Rider

What C# IDE Is Best Right Now?

It says a lot about C# that there are four major Integrated Development Environments for it. This review covers three of them because I don’t do Mac.

The Competitors

• Visual Studio 2019 Community, Professional, Enterprise, Version 16.9 ▪ Windows 10
• Visual Studio Code, Version 1.54.x + OmniSharp, Version 1.23.9 ▪ Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10; Windows Server 2008+; Linux (Snap or native for many distros); MacOS 10.10+
• JetBrains Rider, Version 2020.3 ▪ Windows 8.1, 10; MacOS 10.13+, Linux Debian 9+, Ubuntu 16.04+, CentOS 7+, Fedora 30+, Other with GLIBC 2.17+, Snap Package

Installation

These three products off distinctly different philosophies on how to obtain and setup a working environment.

Installing Visual Studio 2019

You start by downloading the Visual Studio Installer for the edition you want:

Editions of Visual Studio 2019

Next, you select predefined feature sets which will include sets of predefined packages. You can tweak the list of selected…