68 engineers on Hacker News describe using Visual Studio first-hand: 19 endorse it, 14 regret it, 5 are mixed.
“Moving to VS2002 was an absolutely horrible regression.”
regret · production · bartread · 2025-10-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“VS is kind of a joke. To build a couple 100 line WinRT file it loads the entire device library from all of history”
regret · personal · araes · 2023-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I also really miss the awesome power and integration of Visual Studio (not VSCode, the stripped down editor, but the full fledged one).”
endorse · personal · solardev · 2023-09-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I would never again use a closed-source IDE... Microsoft Visual Studio made me learn that, decades ago.”
regret · personal · dannymi · 2022-06-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For the last 1 or probably 2 years now I've been using VS2019 quite successfully on a 10 year old laptop”
mixed · personal · 2 yr · ahonhn · 2021-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“had zero problem running visual studio with a small project and doing whatever I had to do”
endorse · personal · techolic · 2020-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“IMO VS on Windows is still miles ahead of VS on Mac”
endorse · production · mb_72 · 2020-05-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I can finally ditch vs for vs code.”
regret · production · rraghur · 2019-08-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“VS is a great IDE, but the actual part of editing text, which is still a significant part of programming, kind of sucks.”
mixed · production · krylon · 2018-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Visual Studio git integration is also quite limited, but SourceTree did serve me well.”
regret · personal · zubspace · 2017-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“VS has excellent granular settings in this area... VS handles it flawlessly and we haven't looked back.”
endorse · production · shoover · 2017-10-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“never-again crashing Visual Studio Community and randomly-failing-builds Xamarin Forms”
regret · production · willemmali · 2017-01-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Visual Studio and the VsVim plugin happily for years. They work great together.”
endorse · personal · QuadrupleA · 2016-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“a lot of the dev workflow has moved out of, say, Visual Studio”
regret · production · yawgmoth · 2016-08-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At work, we migrated a small codebase this year to VS2008. It was "painful".”
regret · production · dietrichepp · 2015-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using VS for a few years now, I used Emacs in college, but I much prefer VS”
endorse · personal · bargl · 2015-08-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For personal tinkering, that's great... starts at $600 for the licensed equivalent of Community.”
mixed · personal · StevePerkins · 2015-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the WinPhone with C# and VS is by far the friendliest”
endorse · production · AdeptusAquinas · 2015-07-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Nothing beats it in my opinion.”
endorse · personal · WorldWideWayne · 2015-07-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Visual Studio since it was called Visual C++. VS 2013 is one of, if not the buggiest versions I have used.”
regret · production · 20 yr · snarfy · 2014-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Visual Studio vs. IBM's version of Eclipse... many of the DEVs preferred C#”
endorse · production · emcrazyone · 2014-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using VS 2013 Community for a few days now, for C#/MVC work. ... A very nice surprise.”
endorse · personal · atlantic · 2014-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“have been using Windows as main OS for years mainly because of the existence of VS.”
endorse · personal · stinos · 2014-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Visual Studio is nice and C# is surprisingly decent as a webdev language.”
endorse · production · overgard · 2014-02-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Out-of-the-box VS 2013 (and C# development) is so far ahead of Eclipse (and Java development) that it isn't even the same sport.”
endorse · production · hravnx · 2014-02-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using VS2013 with ReSharper 8... the pair seem to be faster than ever.”
endorse · personal · aphistic · 2013-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I like VS since I've been using it to develop a C# app these last two months.”
endorse · personal · 0.17 yr · joshguthrie · 2013-11-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I didn't have issues with the speed of Visual Studio running on my beefed up MBPro, but the keybinding stuff was just too much to deal with.”
mixed · production · taude · 2013-10-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“If you load a single monolithic legacy solution, the Intellisense database is huge, and you run into cases where you have to close every single thing other than Visual Studio”
regret · production · WhaleBiologist · 2012-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I remember how burned I was when Visual Studio moved from VBScript to .NET as its macro language. All the time I had invested”
regret · personal · lelele · 2012-07-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“VS compiles more slowly than gcc but overall it's a better compiler.”
regret · production · shin_lao · 2011-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use MS Visual Studio to build WPF desktop apps”
endorse · production · Corvus · 2011-11-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“IMO, it was a mistake for Visual Studio to default to warning level 3. ... In Visual Studio, this is accomplished by #pragma warning( disable: 4100 )”
mixed · production · palish · 2011-08-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For desktop software, I'm a big fan of Microsoft Visual Studio's IDE.”
endorse · personal · brianwillis · 2010-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Visual Studio didn't support all the stuff that they could do with their open tools”
regret · production · kaffiene · 2010-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Visual Studio can automatically step into the source while debugging. This has saved me tons of time.”
endorse · personal · MichaelGG · 2010-11-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We love C# and the Azure/VisualStudio integration is great.”
endorse · production · vyrotek · 2010-10-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had to find a correct setup of Visual Studio, with all the dependencies, and then compile and deploy the module, just to make a small change”
regret · production · euroclydon · 2010-06-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“You wouldn't hit it just cleaning in Visual Studio”
neutral · production · mika314 · 2026-08-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I spent two days on the phone with Microsoft last year trying to find a way to pay them $700 to renew my lapsed Visual Studio subscription.”
neutral · personal · jasonkester · 2026-06-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“decided to cancel all IDE subscriptions (Visual Studio, JetBrains, Windsurf, etc.)”
neutral · production · zazibar · 2026-04-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using vim for 20 years (vim, visual studio, vim again, now Emacs)”
neutral · personal · hmeh · 2024-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“as previously stated in Pycharm and Visual Studio (not tested on others) there is.”
neutral · personal · funkydata · 2024-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have to use Visual Studio for work most of the time”
neutral · production · kgwxd · 2022-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It was literally a single click to load it in Visual Studio.”
neutral · production · jiggawatts · 2022-06-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I do all my hobbyist development in .NET 5 on a M1 Mac using Visual Studio 2019 for Mac”
neutral · personal · billyhoffman · 2022-05-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Visual Studio 2022 recently which has AI driven code prediction built into it.”
neutral · personal · mwattsun · 2021-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've worked on multiple compilers (optimizations expert) at MSFT on VS and CUDA”
neutral · production · ibains · 2020-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The escrow includes instructions about tooling needed & versions (Visual Studio and others)”
neutral · production · davengh · 2019-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Switching to an entirely new IDE I think would make people's heads explode.”
neutral · production · daveslash · 2019-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I get by in other editors such as Visual Studio and VSCode by downloading emacs emulators.”
neutral · personal · petilon · 2019-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It's the same with other tools that I've used for decades: VS, vi, word, excel.”
neutral · personal · 20 yr · zwieback · 2019-03-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Before you can even open a project in Visual Studio, you need the entire SDK installed.”
neutral · production · zamalek · 2018-06-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I do. We migrated to VS 2015 this year.”
neutral · production · pjmlp · 2017-10-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“less if I fire up Docker, Visual Studio or heavier apps”
neutral · production · rcarmo · 2016-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Visual studio and netflix? 6hrs.”
neutral · personal · Justen · 2015-07-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the only Windows I have in my house is a VM for using Visual Studio and writing C# web apps”
neutral · personal · manyxcxi · 2014-11-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using node tooling even in VS web projects for 3-4 years now”
neutral · production · tracker1 · 2014-11-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It's also a bit limited in terms of VS integration, but I can manage.”
neutral · production · tracker1 · 2013-11-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the only way I could get the thing working was to delve into the bowels of visual studio”
neutral · personal · VaedaStrike · 2013-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For programming, I prefer QtCreator to Visual Studio.”
neutral · personal · chmike · 2013-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use a library that can currently only be compiled without a substantial amount of effort on Visual Studio 2005 or 2008”
neutral · production · microtonal · 2012-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My work on Visual Studio impacted every single user every day, which is ridiculously cool and humbling.”
neutral · production · aaronbrethorst · 2012-10-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the Git Source Control Provider for Visual Studio with zero issues”
neutral · personal · lusr · 2011-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“If you're working heavily with Eclipse/VS, it is definitely jarring to switch back and forth”
neutral · personal · dekayed · 2011-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using ViEmu and Visual Assist since VS 2003”
neutral · personal · 7 yr · roel_v · 2010-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“IE is a whole different beast you have to have visual studio to do any decent level of debugging”
neutral · production · kls · 2010-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Visual Studio 2008 / C# 3 for most programming (corporate coder here)”
neutral · production · mullr · 2010-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?