Rider team lets .NET devs in on IDE plans, though it’s mostly about catching up with Java tooling

Rider team lets .NET devs in on IDE plans, though it’s mostly about catching up with Java tooling

IDE development company JetBrains has provided .NET programmers with a first glimpse of what to expect from its next Rider release. 

Though nothing seems to be set in stone yet, Rider 2021.1 is most likely going to see the IDE catching up to the rest of the JB portfolio, while also improving things for F#, WPF, and ASP.NET devs.

Web developers keen on using ASP.NET are promised better integration of the aspnet-codegenerator and a user interface to simplify its configuration. The Rider team also plans to make their IDE more helpful when refactoring F# code by adding more suggestions and quick fixes, and support Unity devs when debugging serialised objects and properties.

Users of the WPF Preview will soon have some more features to play with, since “support for custom markups, design time attributes, templates, third-party controls, and resources from separate files and referenced assemblies” is on the agenda.

In order to create feature parity with other JetBrains IDEs, the Rider team is currently still working around the peculiarities of their tool’s architecture to finally bring collaborative coding capabilities to Rider. The feature was introduced last year under the “Code with me” banner, but apparently couldn’t yet be added to the .NET IDE yet because of its disparate frontend and backend. 

Rider is also going to see the addition of IntelliJ IDEA’s Problems View, which aims to give users an overview of everything the IDE has found to be wrong with the current file along with problem descriptions and some pointers as to how to fix the issues. In IntelliJ IDEA, the view is part of the Inspection Widget and can be quite useful when trying to navigate to supposedly problematic code.

Another area in which Rider is supposed to catch up is code completion. While developers using other languages already have the chance to get suggestions on what to write next based on ranking models trained using anonymous user data, the Rider team currently looks to include the underlying tech for C# coders as well.

The welcome screen and performance haven’t vanished from JetBrains’ “to improve” list yet, though the current focus lies on the loading time in the solution explorer. Meanwhile the initial display is meant to be more helpful when debugging running processes, so future versions are planned to be fitted with ways of attaching processes without devs having to open or create projects.

A final release date for the next big Rider release isn’t set yet. However, the release rhythm of the last couple of years indicates that version 2021.1 might land some time in April. So developers still have enough time to upvote some other feature they deem more useful for their cause.