Visual Studio extensions and alternatives

Another (relatively) quick post for today: It just occurred to me that, since my work VM has been restored from an older backup, the changes I made to Visual Studio a week ago are all gone. And that’s fine. I wasn’t entirely convinced that CodeRush was something I wanted to stick with anyway.

Since my VM is a little messed up now, I’ve been thrashing around a bit the last few days trying alternate ways to test some stuff out. I have some PowerShell scripts that I usually run on my VM, and I thought it would be fairly easy to copy them over to my laptop or desktop and run them there. But the specific set of modules I need is apparently a little complicated, and I haven’t been able to exactly recreate my environment. I’m sure I could, given time, but oh well.

Then I came up with the idea of installing LINQPad on my desktop and running some stuff there. That wasn’t terribly hard to do, but I’m referencing some DLLs in those that aren’t on my desktop, and, again, recreating the specific environment I needed got a bit too complicated and I gave up. That did get me thinking about upgrading my Pro license to a Developer license, so I’d have nuget support. I might still do that, but not right away.

And, finally, I have been looking at JetBrains Rider a bit lately. I noticed last week that their prices have gone up. Rider is still pretty affordable though. The old price was $139 for the first year (for personal use); the new price is $149. As a subscription product, that’s still enough that it’s not an impulse buy for me. I’d have to know that I was actually going to use it consistently, outside work. But lately I’m not doing enough programming outside work to justify it.

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