Well before coming to the verdict let’s have a look at what basically is Visual
Studio.
Visual Studio is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), it’s not just
an editor, but you get debugging support, intellisense, refactoring tools and
much more. As a beginner, you will be learning the basic concepts of
languages and their use which might have chunks of basic projects which will
check your understanding of algorithms and syntaxes. To aid these, an IDE
gives you more tools to help you through tasks that are mundane. For
example, if I want to rename a variable, my tools can do a safe rename.
Meaning it actually goes through my codebase and makes sure the rename
happens across multiple files and to variables. It is apparent that Visual
Studio gives you a wide platform to code tirelessly which again is very
beneficial for a beginner to just focus on the logic and concept rather than
diving into the complexity of coding standards. Following are some features
of Visual Studio to support students:
● Custom or dynamic debugging and code analysis, which helps in
identifying the mistakes and enhancing the quality of code.
● It has fast navigation of code system which helps to find types easily and identify
where they’re referenced within the code or not.
● Advanced IntelliSense has prediction algorithm for
helping with the navigation of the codes.
● Live unit testing helps to automatically run impacted unit tests.
Whereas a text editor has no such tools and the developer has to write code
very vigilantly. The question arises whether the use of Visual Studio(IDE) is
beneficial for the developers in their career ahead? The answer is No. It is
true that Visual Studio is valuable for beginners but as a developer later you
should learn how to work without it, learn how you can compile the files,
how to use tools, how to write a program with only a simple text editor.
Remember that maybe someday you will have to work in an environment
without Visual Studio.
But Visual Studio is after all, a tool that will make your life easier and will
allow you to save time, so as a newcomer it’s worth learning and as long as
you can understand it and use it well.
