JetBrains Rider was introduced in January of this year but spent the most part of the year in private Early Access Preview, not yet ready for the public. Now the EAP has been made available to everyone who wants to see what it is like to develop for .NET on the IntelliJ platform. There are some issues to be fixed before it becomes generally available but the tool is quite stable.
Rider is built on the JetBrains’ platform that is popular among Java developers through IntelliJ IDEA and JavaScript ones through WebStorm. The main .NET component is ReSharper, an out-of-process language server extension for Visual Studio that has been adapted to work in the new context as a back-end providing code analysis, code completion, refactoring, fixes, etc.. Rider runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Some of the main features of the new IDE are:
- Support for .NET Framework, .NET Core and Mono
- Support for major .NET languages: C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET (ASPX, Razor), XAML
- Support for additional languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, HTML, CSS, SQL, XML. Sass and LESS to be added at some point later
- Support for Visual Studio and Mono solutions, MSBuild, XBuild, Unity and .NET Core projects
- NuGet integration
- 2,000+ code inspections and 1,000+ actions and fixes via ReSharper
- Decompiler
- 50+ refactorings
- Unit Testing - NUnit, XUnit
- Debugging
- VCS - Git, Subversion, Mercurial, Perforce, TFS
- Databases - MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, etc.
- Extensible with plug-ins. Over 500 already existing in the repository
Rider is available separately for download or can be obtained through the Toolbox.
