Project Rider — First thoughts

Before I’ll start writing about Project Rider, I would like to invite everyone to my lecture during 13th Linux Session, taking place between 2nd and 3rd of April 2016 at Wrocław University of Technology. I will be speaking about ASP.Net Core and how I think it will change Linux web-developer scene in a future. The lecture will be in polish.

As a week passed and I had some time to work on new Jetbrains Tool — Project Rider. I would like to share my thoughts about it with you guys.

Of course, I wasn’t expecting revolution — I already had experience with previous JetBrains Product, mostly with PyCharm and RubyMine (thanks to my student license it is much easier to use those tools for my college assigments). And I had received another awesome IDE based on the same engine, and it works really well. And it works on my Fedora, and works fasts — which will always be a advantage over Visual Studio.

Still, as for the current moment it’s not an environment that I would prefer to use for developing ASP.Net applications. It is of course awesome for standard console-based C# projects (and even NuGet Packaging works awesome and I think it is much more handy than Visual Studio 2015 Community version). So, where is a problem?

First of all, ASP.Net projects cannot be generated from Project Rider at the moment. It could be because of fact that right now ASP.Net Core is not distributed with Mono, but as a separate package. But detecting if it is there would be really great, and I hope that functionality will be implemented some time in a future.

That leaves us with generating ASP.Net projects with Yeoman. And Yeoman doesn’t generate .sln files, which are necessary for Project Rider to work on them. Thanks to that, I cannot work on my new projects created on Linux with Project Rider — I have to create new project in VS under Windows, and then download it under Linux and then import it to IDE.

As for my old projects, that were made around January in Visual Studio — there was some issues with solution files, thanks to which Project Rider displayed every file that was included in a project as if they were in a root directory of a project. Of course it is possible to work like that, but it is rather annoying.

I also couldn’t test debugging, as I had issues with running my website projects from somewhere else than terminal.

Still I hope that those are just merely a setbacks, and those functionalities will be implemented in next beta releases.