NetBeans vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

If your organization works with developing or supporting Java applications and is focused on running efficiently with a lean budget, NetBeans would be a good choice to consider.

If your development staff uses other languages, or prefers a high level of available professional IDE support, it may be better to consider a paid option if your budget allows.

It's useful for app development, debugging, and testing. I've been using it for two years and have seen it grow into a fantastic tool. All of the features, NuGet packages, and settings that enable different types of projects are fantastic. It also has a connection to Azure DevOps and Git. It's a fantastic product that's simple to use.

• Great code completion, just start typing some code and the program will fill in the code.
• Find/Replace is a key feature and works through whole projects as opposed to just a single file.
• Side by side code comparison right in the interface allows me to update similar pages.
• I appreciate the ease of using variable highlighting, with a wave of the mouse you can see visually where a given variable exists in your code.

Incentivized

• Rock solid intellisense. For C# and VB.Net code, the intellisense provided by Visual Studio is hands down the best. If you find that you have a hard time remembering parameters of functions, or what object names were, the intellisense will rescue you and help me be an efficient developer.
• Super fast and simple to use debugger for C# and VB. Everything in the debugger is handed to you on a silver platter. When you stop on a break point, it immediately shows you the local variables, the call stack, and even your current memory usage. Setting up watch variables is super simple and you can even make breakpoints conditional so it will only stop on certain conditions.
• Hides the tedious tasks. There are quite a few things like publishing, creating click once deployments, and adding/removing settings in the project files that can be really time consuming when trying to do it by hand (such as if you don't have access to Visual Studio and you need to make changes). Visual Studio hides all the tedium from you by making nice point and click interfaces to get things done quickly.

Incentivized

• Heavy software needs more RAM. It does tend to use a lot of your computer's resources if you're loading up a huge project and slow things down.
• Problems with configuring plugins.
• With every release of a new version, there are some bugs which create problems while coding.

Incentivized

• Certain settings and features can sometimes be challenging to locate. The interface isn't always intuitive.
• Sometimes there are too many ways to do the same thing. For example, users can quickly add a new workspace in Source Control Explorer when a local path shows as "Not Mapped," but it doesn't indicate that the user might want to check the dropdown list of workspaces. The shortcut of creating a new workspace by clicking on the "Not Mapped" link can lead to developers creating too many workspaces and causing workspace management to become unwieldy. If the shortcut link were removed, the user would be forced to use the Workspace dropdown. While it can add an extra step to the process, workspaces would be managed more easily, and this would enforce consistency. At the very least, there should be a high-level administrative setting to hide the shortcut link.

Incentivized

VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.

Incentivized

Netbeans enhances my coding work, shows me where I have errors and helps find variable instances. I would be lost without find/replace in projects functionality as I use projects as templates for new projects. Occasionally the code hints aggravate me, but I understand that it is actually making me a better coder, working to get the 'green light' of a clean file with no errors or clumsy code.

Incentivized

The thing I like the most is Visual Studio doesn't suffer from Microsoft's over eager marketing department who feel they need to redesign the UI (think Office and windows) which forces users to loose large amounts of productivity having to learn software that they had previously known.

Incentivized

NetBeans has a very strong user community. We can find solutions here for almost all the problems we face. In addition, we can forward NetBeans Support teams the problems we cannot solve. We can get quick feedback from the support teams, but I generally try to solve my problems by following the forums.

Incentivized

Between online forums like StackOverflow, online documentation, MSDN forums, and the customer support options, I find it very easy to get support for Visual Studio IDE when I need it. If desired, one can also download the MSDN documentation about the IDE and have it readily available for any support needs.

Incentivized

IBM Rational Application Developer and IntelliJ IDEA are great with hell lot of features packed into the product and are subscription based. However, most of the features they were providing were moot from my organization's business perspective and the cost was expensive. Eclipse is an opensource product with great features, but is difficult to configure and use as compared to NetBeans. One of the frustrating issues we faced with Eclipse was its slowness while saving a file. http://https//stackoverflow.com/questions/40166270/eclipse-neon-pathetically-slow

Incentivized

I personally feel Visual Studio IDE has [a] better interface and [is more] user friendly than other IDEs. It has better code maintainability and intellisense. Its inbuilt team foundation server help coders to check on their code then and go. Better nugget package management, quality testing and gives features to extract TRX file as result of testing which includes all the summary of each test case.

• It changed my way of coding. In my early days of development I never indented code, but with NetBeans my coding way has changed.
• One IDE for all languages. I can write code in PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in only one editor or IDE.

Incentivized

• Using the integration between Visual Studio and our source control service, the cost of re-work and losing code is drastically reduced.
• Paid versions of Visual Studio enable developers to be so much more productive than hacked-together open source solutions that it's hard to imagine developing in Windows without it.
• When combined with support subscriptions and the vast array of free online help options available, Visual Studio saves our developers time by keeping them coding and testing, not wasting their time trying to guess their way out of problems or spend endless hours online hoping to find answers.

Incentivized