Visual Studio

It's is a comprehensive and powerful suite of tools for creating software solutions which can be hosted applications or cloud based apps which can be made for online use or on a Windows platform. It allows you to debug, deploy, review and edit your code and there is even a free plan available nowadays which is awesome. I like that you can debug code relatively easily whether your project has been started or not, and it's easy to setup points which you can return to if you don't feel like going through the whole process again but need to rectify certain points. I also like that you have a feature which allows you to view your projects progress or what's planned or to be delivered for example while you can assign filters to search data relevant to your project easily as well by name or date and quite a lot more. The ability to setup and utilize macros is another key feature I like which greatly speeds up your workflow and the compiler makes it easier to get it done accurately and relatively fast.

It would be nice to see integrations with other software available outside of Microsoft but I understand that it's not in their proprietary interest to do so. Support for popular coding languages like Ruby or PHP is not possible which is a definitely not the best scenario for a lot of my potential projects but it does very well with the C++, VB and .Net languages. The support for C++ in particular, is excellent. The downloadable version is quite large so ensure you have the resources available and are looking ahead to the long term before committing to using it on a particular machine for sure. If you're a Linux or OSX developer or a Linux developer you are out of luck in terms of cross-platform support, unfortunately, this is not the case and it works only on Microsoft Windows devices. And it's not an open source project like Git or Java making it much less practical in terms of taking the initiative to learn it on your own or with the help of an open source community. There's a lot of set up required before you can get moving on your development and deployment. It's great to have this much possible configuration possible though you do well to consider the time investment required in terms of speed to market. The free plan is a great way to learn if it's for your company unless you know prior to starting development that it's required. As a requirement, it's Visual Studio has the big benefit of deploying it across Windows devices through their app store. So you're kind of shoved into this exclusivity once you reach this level of deployment.

The agile processing capabilities make coding deployment easier with all of you requirements in a single dashboard. I appreciate that there is a free plan made available by Microsoft now for Visual Studio. I recall this not being the case a few years ago. But it's to their advantage as they put entrepreneurs in the best position to become upgraded subscribers. I believe this is the only way to deploy your apps to be downloadable on the Windows store so that's a big reason to choose Visual Studio. If you have a need to use Microsoft tools then this platform will certainly make your life easier. If you're wanting something much more flexible then check out IntelliJ for multi-platform support it's incredible.