We have shared the offline installer setup of Rider For Windows and free download links are available for download. Basically, it is a new IDE from JetBrains that promises to be a great alternative to Visual Studio. It’s very responsive, fast, and customizable, with all the usual features that you’d expect from a modern IDE. It also has a very clean and beautiful UI, making it easy to navigate around the different windows.
While it’s still in development, Rider has already made a very good impression. The first thing I noticed was that it’s much more responsive than Visual Studio, even though it’s not the fastest IDE out there. It’s also very customizable, with options to change the color scheme, keyboard bindings, and other things. You can even set the layout of the different windows to your liking, so they’re always exactly where you want them.
Features
It’s also very feature-rich, with support for many different languages, including the ability to run and debug multiple runtimes. It has a lot of the same debugging features as Visual Studio, including the ability to add breakpoints (conditional or otherwise), watches, tracepoints, and more.
It also has a very nice editor, with code completion and templates, auto-inserting matching braces and import directives, quick info tooltips, and gutter icons for inheritance navigation. It also supports the cross-platform Avalonia UI framework, which is very useful for creating GUI applications that can run on various platforms.
What’s new
One of the coolest features that Rider has is the fact that it can automatically detect TODO and BUG comments in your code and display them in a dedicated tool window, which makes it really easy to see what needs to be done. It also has a lot of other cool refactoring features, such as being able to replace string literals with a variable name and being able to use ReSharper to make refactoring a breeze.
Another really cool feature is the fact that it can decompile library types to C# and display them in a regular editor tab, making it very easy to navigate the code and find usages. It can also warn you about vulnerable dependencies in your solution, which is a nice safety net to have.
Supporting Systems
Finally, it has support for popular VCS systems such as Git, Mercurial, and TFS, with the local history of files. And it comes with a wide array of plugins that support different functionality, from F# to Unity support. You can even download more plugins to extend its functionality as you need it.
While I’m not sure if it will ever reach the level of Visual Studio as far as community support is concerned, Rider looks like a very promising IDE that’s well worth checking out. It’s very fast, responsive, and feature-rich, with the added bonus of being fully compatible with Visual Studio projects, which makes it an excellent choice for .NET developers who’re looking for an alternative to the current market leader.