Why is ASP.NET Core Development So Much Harder in VS2017?

As most of you know, I’ve been using Visual Studio 2015 and ASP.NET Core for quite a while and I’ve been pretty happy with the functionality.

But now that we’re in ASP.NET Core 1.1 (I know 2.0 is in preview, but I’m sticking with 1.1 for this discussion) and Visual Studio 2017, it feel a lot harder than it should be.

I miss project.json, but that’s not what this post is about. It’s about a lot of little helpers that used to make it easier for people coming to the platform, including:

Intellisense would suggest packages for extension methods (e.g. ILoggerFactory.AddConsole, or IApplicationBuilder.AddStaticFiles).

Opening Project.json didn’t require right-clicking the project (like opening the csproj file does).

The json editor seems ridiculously slow and buggy (application.json mostly).

CSProj seems to be special-cased so if I add a reference via the ‘Manage Nuget Packages” then do it via command-line, it overwrites the last change (even though I made it several builds ago).

Opening the references node (Solution Explorer) and going to the Nuget references doesn’t give me an option to add or edit the references, have to use the “Manage NuGet Packages” from the project node.

There are more and I’ll probably continue to mention them in comments, but I’m frustrated.

Perhaps you’ll tell me this is mostly for converted projects, but I tried most of these with a brand-new 1.1 project and they were identical.

Anyone notice a difference? Maybe I have a bad VS2017 install?