Microsoft Visual Studio vs. Visual Studio Test Professional

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.

Visual Studio Test Professional is best for .NET and C# based development, which is what 90% of our developers and projects do. It is an integral part of the CI/CD pipeline for our custom made Enterprise resource planning tool. It also works very well with Azure providing seamless integration to way more functionality.

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

• Test scenarios in the SDLC process can be easily applied to the Visual Studio Test tool.
• It works compatible with Microsoft Windows Server and database.
• The debug screen of the Visual Studio Test product is quite successful. It allows you to quickly access the details of the error received.

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

• The solution needs more reports and more dashboards, as well as more details for each originated spare test case or best guess in test cases.
• The service right now is far too expensive. You need to pay per user.
• The tools for unit testing can be improved, giving a better ability to manage tests.

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

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

Visual Studio Test Professional's overall usability is extremely high quality. It is extremely functional and like all Microsoft products has a user interface that is well designed and is extremely user friendly. Any functionality which I looked for, I was able to either understand immediately or find a user guide online.

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

My team has always been able to troubleshoot with the help of customer support (and even schedule a virtual meeting!) in a timely manner. The support is provided immediately and with the necessary knowledge to answer/solve any questions/problems I or my team experience.

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.

When using Azure Devops, it only has a basic test plan while using the extension, and it is better suited if you only use Azure Devops, but VS test professional provides comprehended test execution and management as most of the developers and testers use Visual Studio to develop their apps and publish their builds.

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

• Visual Studio Test professional fits right in with the other Microsoft Lifecycle Management tools.
• End to end, Development, Test, Deployment and Delivery assures the pipeline is continuous. Visual Studio Test Professional is an integral part of that pipeline.
• Familiarity with Microsoft Tools makes usability intuitive, makes it easy to ramp up our Testers.

Incentivized