For many workloads (at least .NET), JetBrains Rider.
For C/C++ on Windows, well, you have VS Code and also JetBrains CLion, but IMO CLion is surprisingly rougher than Rider, even though it's older. You can get stuff done though.
I'll add my 0.02$ for rider too.. it even works (in EAP) for m1 arm... I do use vs code and rider depending on if I'm debugging something on the server or need to save the small amount of ram I've got on my air for debugging in the browser.. but m1 Rider is FAST.. far faster than even rider in linux on my xps with 32gb of ram
This is what keeps me on Visual Studio. It's free for personal and open-source use, so I use it at home.
Since I know it and am familiar with it, I make my employer pay for a commercial license at work. In the grand scheme of things, it is not that expensive in a commercial setting.
VS Code is great, but I do not think it is a comprehensive replacement for Visual Studio proper when doing full stack .NET development.
Intellisense is not that good. Intellicode is missing. Managing nugget packages is not so well integrated. It's harder to debug and investigate memory leaks. I can't see code coverage in the editor or run tests with right click straight from the method I want to test.
It's usable for sure but the development it's not as fast as in Visual Studio.
I still use VS Code if I want to modify some files like XML, json, yaml, and I don't want to fire another instance of Visual Studio for that.
VS used to be heavy and bloated. But that was a long time ago. I use VS since 2010 version. It improved by leaps and bounds since then. New 2022 version is almost as fast as VSCode, if you have a good PC.
Microsoft's official C#/.NET extensions for VS Code use OmniSharp to provide IntelliSense, so I think they are becoming a lot more friendly on that front.
As others have already pointed out, OmniSharp is "good enough", but what's built into Visual Studio is still a lot better.
I get the all products pack every year personally and it's worth every penny. One of the two software packages i break my "no subscriptions" rule for, and the only one i'm not even salty about doing so.
They all kinda support editing all languages - syntax highlighting ect. but the ui/menus/tools/refactoring/etc are all tailored in each app the the desired language
I happily pay for rider license every year. When you make so much money as a dev, investing in the tool you use every single day makes a lot of financial sense. Even if it makes you 1 or 2% more productive than VS it pays for itself (in my experience the speed boost alone is so worth it)
You can use the EAP builds for free in exchange for some stability issues, which in my experience have affected me all of 0 times. You can even download EAP builds from the toolbox for convenience by clicking on Rider and switching to the "Versions" tab.
EAP is free, and the subscriptions also work as a one-time payment by giving you permanent access to the latest-at-subscription-start version when accruing a year's worth. So you can pay 1 year and not renew, and it's the same as just buying the thing.
It's not really about the cost. It's about the principle of having to pay any amount of money to be able to do development work at all with your preferred choice of OS/editor.
Attaching a price to your ability to onboard a language with your favorite workflow changes how you view that language and the motives of its maintainers when compared to the alternatives for that platform. Java has no such barrier to adoption on Linux, for example, because IntelliJ happens to have a community edition.
Visual Studio's community edition is something entirely different from IntelliJ's community edition. IntelliJ is open source[1] but Visual Studio is proprietary with tricky license terms[2] that limit it to companies of a certain size, among other things.
Note that Rider already supports C/C++ on Windows with the Rider for Unreal Engine fork. This fork is planned to get merged into mainline Rider sometime next year.
The "some workloads" also apply for that. I don't know about DirectX, but the other ones might be doable as long as you create the project once in VS and then (for MFC and ATL) hand edit the normally tool-generated partial classes. For UWP, you'd have to hand wrangle the XAML. You'd then invoke MSBuild for building. AFAIK there's nothing super special about MFC and ATL that would make debugging impossible, but it's true I've never tried it in VS Code.
For C/C++ on Windows, well, you have VS Code and also JetBrains CLion, but IMO CLion is surprisingly rougher than Rider, even though it's older. You can get stuff done though.