After wasting most of the afternoon trying to fix Visual Studio, I can honestly say is is the worst IDE I have ever had the misfortune to use.

Seems the only way to "fix" it is to erase it and reinstall.

Fml

I also have some anecdotal experiences I'd like to share as general facts.

There is no such thing as a perfect IDE. I too have spent entire days damning VS to hell, but in daily use it does it's job well. And there is no getting around the fact that if you want to do serious business, you use .Net, and if you use .Net, you use Visual Studio.
So just embrace it.

Are you using VS 2013? 2019 is the Best IDE you can find.

I agree with you. Looks nice, clean interface, lot of tools and it has a big potential but make an IDE with Electron wasn't a wise choice from Microsoft.

@Nanos
Day 29, Fix Visual Studio

Visual Studio sucks stinky donkey balls. VS Code, on the other hand...

My friend woke up one day to find that basically everything in visual studio stopped working for him, including syntax highlighting and code completion.
And get this: even uninstalling and reinstalling didn't fix it. He tried deleting cache folders, got nothing. Could'nt find anything on Google either. The problem remains unsolved to this day.

It’s been mostly stable for ages now, but it still shits itself more than is proper, if you can justify the cost, JetBrains’ Rider is just pure love.

@LuxARTS Umm visual studio wasn't made with electron - VScode was and it's one of the best regarded text editors. Not an IDE.

I'd also like to throw my anecdotal evidence into the mix - of 3 years using visual studio I've never once HAD to reinstall. There were issues sometimes but most were fixed by restarting it. I'm pretty sure the same can be said by most of my team

Biggest problem with VS is how it tries to be the single IDE to replace all. I tried using it with R and it was awful.

There's so much crap installed if you select all the options and some of it just isn't in VS area of competence.

It's fine at its core mission.

However, I'm enjoying Rider on macOS. No doubt I'll grow to hate it over time.

@platypus I seriously love Rider.

Use different tools to do different things, this is a good habit.
For example, I use Visual Studio Code editor to read and write files, and use terminal and other GUI tools to debug, compile, test, run, etc.
If everything is put into the same tool, then that tool will definitely go wrong.
By the way, this is why I gave up Dotnet, because it is very difficult to debug in the terminal on macOS.

I just installed VS 2019 onto a new machine. Started it up to create a c# WinForm (initial test). I have a way I like my VS setup, been doing it a specific way since 2005. For this, I add tools from Views and moved the Tools window to join Properties view on the right side of my screen.

Crash!

How can something this basic, been in the tool for 15 years, crash?? Confidence level has dropped.

indeed. especially those damned updates. it makes everything worse on every goddamn update