Visual Studio

FIRST-HAND READS

What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.

• “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”

  NEGATIVE · Hacker News · 2026-06-23

• “Visual Studio around 2010 was absolutely horrible for building web based applicatons, with common freezes and input lags.”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-18

• “Visual Studio, which is nice for reading and navigating code”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-16

• “Human developers jump around between files with the Visual Studio fuzzy search, set breakpoints to trace execution in the Debugger, use the IDE's refactoring tools”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-02

• “quickly became too underpowered for Win10 + Visual Studio + SQL Server, because of its u - low powered CPU and only 16GB of RAM”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-05-19

• “the feedback loop in IntelliJ or Visual Studio is just much quicker than the alternatives because you can run and debug the specific tests you need”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-05-18

• “I had to request a new workstation just to tolerate using Visual Studio”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-05-18

• “C# with WinForms and Visual Studio was a decent successor for a while”

  LUKEWARM · Hacker News · 2026-05-07

• “Visual Studio had this mode where it showed the different functions in a file almost as if they were separate files. You could not scroll beyond the functions end but you could easily transition between that mode and global file view. I always found that a nice way of working”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-07

• “For debugging Visual Studio (for adults, not VSCode), or on special occassion WinDbg, is great.”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-05-03

• “it never really reached the peak it did with Visual Studio 6”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-02

• “While the VB6 designer was a smoother experience than the Visual Studio designer it was a much more limiting experience”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-05-02

• “even "full" Visual Studio and Resharper have issues with this”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-04-27

• “Trying to find the right token to change is an exercise in madness, and many things that are visually the same in importance/hierarchy use very slightly different shades for some unknown reason.”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-04-20

• “Visual Studio at the time "aligned" with Metro by, I kid you not, making the main menu bar ALL UPPER CASE so that it looked like Metro tabs!”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-06

• “Visual Studio has had quite some tooling similar to it, and you can have static analysis turned on all the time. Eclipse CDT, which is not capable as VS, but is not a toy and has the same capability: Always on static analysis + Valgrind integration. I used both without any reservation and this habit paid in dividends in every level of development.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-03

• “not nearly as productive as on multimonitor PC with TotalCommander and Visual Studio where I use all the shortcuts subconsciously”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-03-27

• “breath of fresh air. It's the closest I've come to that old school "in the box" desktop development experience you used to get from building desktop software with Visual Studio or IntelliJ IDEA or NetBeans or Eclipse”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-03-12

• “Visual Studio has pretty good CMake support these days, so it should look pretty much like any other Visual Studio solution when you open it there too”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-01-19

• “Even in Visual Studio Enterprise, their flagship developer product, the GPT integration mostly just destroys code regardless of model output. I truly cannot fathom how any of that made it past even a cursory review.”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-12-08

• “ReSharper with Visual Studio was a mainstay for me from 2008-2020”

  POSITIVE · Hacker News · 2025-11-13

• “The interface in Visual Studio could be a bit better overall”

  LUKEWARM · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-11-12

• “surprisingly productive language combined with Visual Studio”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2025-11-03

• “I'm using literally the exact same GUI to build apps that I was over 30 years ago, with Visual Studio”

  MIXED · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-10-18

• “Pre-AI IntelliSense-style autocomplete from Visual Studio or ReSharper makes learning new libraries and language features much easier.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-10-10