Visual Studio vs Tower

If a project type or a platform is available for C#, it's available in Visual Studio. Some IDEs and code editors may cover some project types, but Microsoft always starts with VS. If you work with a cross-platform technology like ASP.NET MVC, it matters less. If you work with Windows-only technologies like UWP or WPF, you have no choice really.

Community edition is almost Pro edition, with just a few exceptions. Unlike old Express editions, it supports plugins.

Supports many types of C, and java, as well as ruby and python.

The plugin development ecosystem is very mature and covers a lot of use cases. For example, it is often easy to find a plugin which allows you to have the keybindings of your preferred editor.

Visual Studio runs on Windows and macOS, so even if you develop on a Mac you can still develop with Visual Studio.

You can use too many programming lang. And you can select them! Like "I want to do this, not this".

Your Visual Studio Online account gives you a place to store your code, backlog, and other project data with no servers to deploy, configure, or manage.

Code productivity tools improve code editing experience greatly, provide static code analysis, refactorings, navigation etc. They are considered by many developers as essential.

Fast-paced development iteration from the Microsoft team, with new versions and fixes almost every week.

In agile development teams one really needs features such as product backlogs where you can assign features to team mates and track their progress on them. VS provides a web based interface for you to track your team's complete progress on the project.

Tower has a good-looking interface and consists of 3 main views - services, repositories and repository.

• Services view for managing integrations with hosting services like GitHub, Bitbucket and Beanstalk.

• Repositories view for organizing local and remote repositories into folders and getting general overview about them.

• Repo view that consists of two main subviews:

  • Working copy view shows modified files and their diff and allows wrapping up changes in a commit.

  • History shows commits alongside metadata and projects file structure.

Additionally, it allows performing various tasks such as merging branches via drag & drop, search allows searching by message, commit hash, author, committer and file and there's a quick open that allows fuzzy-searching for folder names.

Tower shows conflicting files, their authors and the commit that made changes. It then allows selecting which files should be used in the final result.

Tower comes with built-in support for Git LFS. Handy when working with large files.

Git-flow provide a consistent development process by defining a strict branching model that is great for managing large projects. T2 allows setting up and integrating into repos that follow this model.

Tower covers most of the daily tasks that a developer may need to complete. It shows only what you need for the most common tasks without overwhelming the user.

If you are a student, you can get your free Tower Pro license here.

Many Git actions can be undone in Tower simply by using the keyboard shortcut CMD+Z. Examples: Deleting branches and files, staging changes, rebasing & merging branches, or publishing a branch on a remote

Tower offers user profiles. You can then connect GPG keys with your profiles, sign commits and see which commits have been signed and by who.