I do think it's a great IDE, apart from the lag - though that is obviously a big issue.
In fact, after working with VS for years and getting more and more annoyed by the lag, I tried JetBrains Rider - I'm a total convert, it's one of my favourite ever pieces of software! The UI takes a bit of getting used to if you've been using VS for a long time, but not that much. Plus there's an excellent dark theme that is quite close to VS's.
Rider is absolutely stuffed with features and config switches - it's close to feature parity with VS, with VS able to do a few things Rider can't, and vice-versa. Rider absolutely flies by comparison to VS, and is more stable too. Oh, and edit-and-continue "just works" in Rider, whereas I've always found it problematic in VS.
After getting an SSD, trying Rider is my next suggestion :)
I really don't like VS. I did use jetbrains and whoa! Nice!. I'll check out Rider, which is totally new to me (thanks).
The thing about "I do think [VS] a great IDE" is you haven't experienced emacs so you don't know what can be. What emacs is bad at: all the things VS is good at, the high-level code 'understanding'. But honestly for writing/modifying/moving around/various other stuff, emacs is just so astonishingly comfortable when you get used to it. It's not "I don't need to use the mouse", more "I barely need to think about it". And then you've got stackable clipboard, registers, macros from heaven, regexps that just work, so much more...
And perhaps best of all, it's written by programmers for programmers. VS feels like management have been involved in featuritis and "UI/UX experts" as they think of themselves but aren't, have been allowed out of their cage too often.
I'll not recommend you try emacs, it's a lot of investment but if you could get emacs to do high-level stuff as well as the low-level... Right, time for me to stop hijacking this thread!
In fact, after working with VS for years and getting more and more annoyed by the lag, I tried JetBrains Rider - I'm a total convert, it's one of my favourite ever pieces of software! The UI takes a bit of getting used to if you've been using VS for a long time, but not that much. Plus there's an excellent dark theme that is quite close to VS's.
Rider is absolutely stuffed with features and config switches - it's close to feature parity with VS, with VS able to do a few things Rider can't, and vice-versa. Rider absolutely flies by comparison to VS, and is more stable too. Oh, and edit-and-continue "just works" in Rider, whereas I've always found it problematic in VS.
After getting an SSD, trying Rider is my next suggestion :)