I exclusively use Visual Studio Code for editing code. I primarily work with Go, and a little bit with JavaScript/TypeScript, but I need to do some C# work.
I have no interest in using Microsoft’s proprietary C# Dev Kit or dealing with their licensing terms. What capabilities am I losing? The marketing materials for the dev kit talk about a lot of stuff that appear to be features of the open source C# extension, so it’s unclear which features are actually exclusive to the dev kit.
Mostly use Rider but whenever I’ve tried to use the open source extension I’ve had it crash and be quite unreliable, but if it works well for you then go for it.
Unless you’re part of a large enterprise, you’re not missing anything you’re likely to care about.
VS Professional does some counterintuitive magic for handling big related sets of related projects. It’s particularly valuable if one has been cursed to work with old school C# XML SOAP web services.
You’re also missing out on strong support for some other awful proprietary data connector libraries.
