Visual Studio alternative: Project Rider

• by Samuele Resca

Visual Studio alternative: Project Rider

A cross-platform C# IDE based on the IntelliJ platform and ReSharper

 

Here we are, JetBrains  has started to invest in a Visual studio alternative: Project Rider. The IDE is based on the IntelliJ platform and obviously, on ReSharper.

Project Rider is still under development, you can download the early-build version here.

Why now?

The Future of ASP.NET is open source and cross platform, so JetBrains has decided to invest in a cross-platform IDE which is 100% compatble with the new ASP.NET Core.

Points of strength

Project Rider offers an advanced IntelliSense and also all the typical features of IDEs: Navigation( e.g.: go to type,  go to file) and  Refactoring tools.

The points of strength are:

  1. Cross-platform;
  2. Resharper is part of IDE, not an extension;
  3. Build  DNX/.NET CLI projects;
  4. Allows debugging .NET and Mono applications;

Points of weakness

Project Rider is still under development, there are a lot of bugs that JetBrains is still fixing and a lot of features which they still implementing.

At time of writing, the IDE does not support Intellij plugins and NuGet package management is partially supported.

WinForms and WPF designers are not supported and out of scope.

 

Work in progress

JetBrains is still working on these features :

  • NuGet package management: install, update, remove, restore. Not just search;
  • Build window error navigation;
  • Unit test runner;
  • No reload project on external changes: if a project is changed externally, Rider does not prompt to reload the project;
  • Availability of IntelliJ platform plugins: Rider can load IntelliJ platform plugins, however, none of the plugins can be installed, as they have not been marked as being compatible with Rider. You may be able to manually install the contents of the .jar file into the plugins folder, but YMMV;

Conclusion

Project Rider, as an early build IDE, is not ready to be used as main development IDE, but JetBrains is still investing a lot of resources, so it will be a valid alternative to Visual Studio.

Cheers 🙂

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