Sure-Natural-9086 leads a community discussion on the usability gaps (‘paper cuts’) faced by .NET developers using VSCode, with practical suggestions and peer insights.

Common VSCode Papercuts for .NET Developers

Author: Sure-Natural-9086

This community post explores everyday obstacles (‘paper cuts’) encountered while developing C# and .NET applications in Visual Studio Code (VSCode). Drawing on experience since 2006 with Visual Studio, the author appreciates VSCode’s speed and cross-platform utility but identifies areas for improvement when building .NET solutions.

Key Issues Identified

1. NuGet Package Management

  • Visual Studio provides a comprehensive UI for managing and updating NuGet packages across entire solutions.
  • VSCode: Currently lacks a robust NuGet UI, making package management more manual and fragmented.
  • Community solution: vscode-nuget-gallery extension is recommended as a partial fix.

2. Solution Explorer Experience

  • Icon colors in Solution Explorer are noted as an area needing parity with Visual Studio for quicker file identification.
  • See GitHub issue #1804 for community feedback.

3. Build Output Readability

  • Building from the UI can result in uncolorized and hard-to-read output, making failure troubleshooting difficult.
  • Suggestions include outputting build logs to files and reviewing them within VSCode.

4. Extension Availability and Licensing

  • Concerns over subscription models for language extensions; broad agreement that essential language support should be free for all developers.
  • Issues with extensions being disabled on VSCode forks, impacting developers using alternative editors.

5. Personal Workflows and Preferences

  • Some developers prefer a fully manual or text-based workflow, eschewing heavy UIs and integrated management tools in favor of speed and customizability.
  • Multiple experiences shared about moving away from Visual Studio to avoid unexpected UI behaviors or performance issues.

Images and Screenshots

  • The post includes build output and Solution Explorer screenshots to illustrate UI points (links in the original post).

Takeaways and Requests

  • Call for more feedback to be directed at the VSCode C# extension team via GitHub.
  • Suggestions and workarounds from the community for current limitations.
  • Recognition of ongoing improvements, encouragement to continue iterating based on real developer needs.

Discussion concludes with community reflections on why some prefer VSCode, what core features are still missing, and where peer-driven tooling can enhance or fill in existing gaps.

This post appeared first on “Reddit DotNet”. Read the entire article here