Developed by one of biggest names in the business, Rider is an IntelliJ and ReSharper-based IDE designed from the ground up to provide you with comprehensive tools for developing .NET apps and libraries, ASP.NET Core web projects and even Unity games.
Cross-platform IDE that comes with support for the most popular languages used in .NET development
Besides being one of the few apps that can go head to head with Visual Studio, Rider has one major advantage over the popular IDE, and that is cross-platform compatibility, with support for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Besides what has been mentioned, it is also noteworthy to point out that Rider comes with support for most programming languages usually used in .NET development, namely C, VB.NET, ASP.NET, XAML, XML, JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, HTML, CSS and even SQL.
Simple installation process and top-notch user interface
The application can be easily deployed on your computer thanks to a streamlined installer. Subsequently, upon first launching the app, you are greeted by a couple of sequential configuration screens that allow you to choose how the IDE should look according to your environment.
As expected from a JetBrains package, the application boasts a very intuitive and well-organized user interface that, although it is not what you would call eye-catching, it looks right at home on the latest iterations of Windows.
Feature-packed IDE for .NET development that can be used by all categories of users
It should not take too long until you get to grips with every feature that this full-fledged IDE has to offer. You get everything from an advanced code editor with all the bits and bobs, a very handy engine for code analysis, a decompiler, intuitive tools for navigation and search functions, for refactoring, debugging, refactoring and even for version control.
It should be noted that you can work with SQL and databases straight from Rider’s main window, as it has no problems allowing you to connect to databases, run queries, as well as edit and analyze schemas.
Despite its early development stage, Rider is already a legit alternative to Visual Studio
Despite being in a fairly young development stage, Rider shows great potential for .NET development. All in all, by implementing the same recipe that has proven to be successful for other, in-house IDEs, JetBrains have once again managed to create a very reliable and efficient, all-in-one IDE that can be used on all key OSes out there.
