Three IDE Options For Improved Productivity

Our tour of three things you can do to make your life easier will look at IDE options in this episode.  We all have our favorite IDE within the first year or two of professional development.  That usually falls into either the Eclipse or Visual Studio camp.  However, there are a lot of other options available.  While your primary tool is useful, these additional tools may provide a better choice in specific instances.

JetBrains IDE Options

This family of tools may be your primary source for IDE options.  While they have a flavor specifically targeted at a broad range of platforms, they also have a "feel" that is maintained across each of them.  This suggestion may be the most expensive (i.e., not free) of the IDE options we look at in this episode.  Nevertheless, there are free download trial options, and I think you will find them worth the money.  I have done so, and I often return to the Jet Brains site to keep up with their latest offerings.

The Jet Brains Home Page

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio is a large and full-featured product.  It should be among the first considerations when you are considering team development IDEs that can be used to build enterprise systems.  However, all of that functionality and power comes at a cost in size and resource utilization.  When you want a simple, yet powerful and extensible IDE, then Visual Studio Code is a good fit.  The user experience with this tool is not the same as its full-blown brother.  Instead, this seems to fit smaller projects and individual file editing needs in a comfortable way.  I use it on an almost daily basis to edit configuration files, text files (small and very large), and any task that is helped by a macro.  I do not view this as a competitor to the other tools out there.  Instead, this is a helper tool you will find useful to install on your development machine.  By the way, do not let the Visual Studio name dissuade you.  While the Visual Studio tools are Microsoft products, they do have versions that run on non-Windows platforms very well.

Check out the Visual Studio Code Home Page

Database IDE Options

This is another bucket item with several options.  While there are some excellent IDEs for databases that work with several engines, there are some good ones that are platform-specific.  Instead of trying to match a platform to a tool, we just kept this a general point.  You will spend a lot of your time working on and in databases.  That goes with the territory.  Although you can always fall back on command line query engines, these tools will make you more productive.  They often will teach you a few things about advanced features as well.  Is there anyone that does not like to save time and learn new stuff?

Learn More: Database IDE’s you should check out