I thought to myself, “This should be fairly straightforward.” And, in my defense, in the year 2018, I think it should be a fairly benign task. I wanted to download some sample C# (“c sharp” for systems that break when trying to tokenize the hash sign) application code and run it on my laptop. But I also wanted to explore some of the lighter weight Integrated Development Environments that have popped up. Namely, Atom with its IDE UI package and Visual Studio Code.
After a couple hours of installing Atom, the IDE, guessing at which combination of language support extensions would help and trying to get it to do anything other than throw OmniSharp errors, I decided, maybe I would save Atom for another day. Atom looks like it will be great for languages like Python, PHP and JavaScript. Maybe it does OK for some flavors of C#, but I couldn’t find the path to that in 2 hours or less.
Surely, Visual Studio Code would be up to the task. OK, other than some fun little “dotnet” commands which have replaced the convoluted menus in Visual Studio proper, I thought, “This ain’t half bad.”
But then came my sample code… written in .NET 4.5.2. Awww, VS Code only likes .NET Core. Although I saw a gem of a write-up on Stack Exchange about getting VS code to build and run .NET Framework apps.
That was fun to scan, but I wasn’t about to take that Chimera for a joy ride. Then came the final boot to the head: The sample app was 32-bit. VS Code doesn’t play 32-Bit. Nope. And I don’t blame them. So, VS Code for another day as well.
4 hours later. Back to VS! (You will build… when I say… you will build…). That’s catchy. I wonder if I added some crunchy guitar and put a little more yell in my voice if that could be song. I could call my band… Codellica? I think that goes squarely (oh so very squarely) into the “Let’s not and say we did” pile. Heap? Certainly not a stack or we get it back real quick-like.
In defense of VS, even though it is bulky and kinda slow, As of 2017, I no longer have to set aside half a day for an install. It downloaded and installed while I was writing this article, and… it was done 2 paragraphs ago.