u/elmanoucko

this needs to get out my chest... this is not a rant, more like a heartbreak...

I first touched VS when I was barely able to know what was even remotely happening, got a copy of the 6.0 suite as a kid installed on my good old win98 pc and spent night toying with WYSIWYG editor, couldn't do anything else, but the itch was there, it felt awesome...

Few years later, in the later part of the 00's at the end of my teenage years, with a bit more general knowledge of programming, I started using VS Express after a friend showed me a project he was working on, started to learn .net, slowly built up skills that got me my first jobs as a dev, the first of a long series in the next two decades...

did a few attempts at writing extensions, banged my head against the wall trying to do some kind of pretty bad JIT interpreter for 3.5, powershell but worse, spend way too much nights reading the msdn I had installed locally on my marchine (that was awesome), hours arguing in favor of VS, ok it maybe needs resharper, but VS+resharper is just a banger....

waited as a kid before christmas for the next TechDays, watching hours of conferences about those new cool features, proudly went to work with an early 00's VS branded bag a friend offered me from his own participation as a conference, WPF ? woaw... WCF ? woaw... WF, wait... BizTalk ? oddly specific kink, wouldn't recommend to anyone, but I love beating myself up, SOAP is the future y'know, that rest and json fad will go away, xml is for serious business.

Enjoyed a few years of pure luxury through a "moderately legit" BizSpark... had a blog talking about the new cool stuffs I learned and problems I faced, got worried when VSCode came out of atom, got worried when github got bought, daddy's usually sweet, but I also know some of daddy's dark side... got excited when finally a real support for non win system started to grow, "no more mono or xamarin ?" what a relief... even got to a peak where resharper felt almost optional...

TLDR: I wouldn't be who I am, without VS and the .net ecosystem, even at a personal level when considering the impact it had on my "life trajectory" and all the doors it opened out of sheer passion for that whole thing and was my daily road companion for a good part of that journey

But... for the past ~5years... I switched progressively to the Jetbrains ecosystem, in the end, I just need a good text editor with few refactoring tools and basic debugging features, I'm mostly working on my own now and overtime, I switched entirely, it's been about 2 years now. It maybe does less, but it does what I need and as good as VS would.

Then, a few days ago, daddy got back with the milk... and I don't recognize him...

He's barely able to talk and smells wierd, stops mid sentence and change topic... is it that copilot thingy ? It's not even enabled... I'm happy you're back but... you feel... different... not like seeing someone you've grown with after a few years, more like.... the really basic things feels different...

for instance, you bought github and I've never seen a git integration that is that... barebone... what happened to you ? Remember your uncle TFS and how it turned out with a crap father like sourcesafe ? You were able to cooperate fantastically with it, even handling his wife brother SVN not that bad and now you can't handle properly your adoptive child ?

On every other simple "basic" features it feels like... a glow down... and the things that made you special now... feels like another kind of special... feels like even the old Express could do better if it wasn't for it's deep "core limitations". But as a glorified text text editor with intellisense and a few helps here and there to find/move/rename/etc things... what happened ?

It's been only a few days now, but I feel something died inside me.

You're back, but I don't even want to launch you... I miss you VS.