A month without R# or Rider - Editing, Debugging & Refactoring

The post continues an experiment using plain Visual Studio 2019 and focuses on editing, unit testing, debugging, and refactoring. The author says Visual Studio feels more limited in code analysis, selection handling, test support, and debugger workflows, while Rider offers more complete assistance and faster feedback.

Reading notes

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• Rider shows more code information while editing, including continuous code analysis, solution-wide analysis, and suggestions that help remove dead code or use newer C# features.
• Visual Studio handles identifier selection, member expansion, and keyboard-driven refactoring less well, while Rider’s Camel Humps and refactoring options make those tasks easier.
• In unit testing, Visual Studio is slower, less reliable at recognizing tests, and offers fewer ways to group, rerun, or track tests during debugging.
• In debugging, Rider supports more flexible stepping, decompiling and debugging external code, data breakpoints, and better inspection of complex collections.
• The author also lists extra Rider features such as built-in code coverage, clipboard comparison, theme switching, presentation mode, and clearer UI hints.
• The conclusion is that Rider is far ahead of plain Visual Studio, especially for productivity, keyboard use, responsiveness, and refactoring.