Mono Develop vs Visual Studio

I couldn't find a recent topic about this. What is the current situation? My questions:

1. Is Mono Develop viable for pro development? Is it stable and robust at least?
2. Are there any binary differences between VS and MD builds?
3. Which IDE would your recommend for a solo project and why?

I worked with C++ in VS so I'm familiar with it. However, MD is free. I want my game to support deep modding, including an ability to make custom C# scripts. This means that my players will need an IDE and MD is free. I fear there might some problems when mixing binaries deployed trough VS by me, vs binaries deployed trough MD by my modders. What do you think?

 

VS 2013 Community is free. Ive used VS since Visual Basic first came out and Mono Dev since version 4 and VS is just more professional and gets the job done quicker, that just my take on it of cause. Also I develop a lot of winform apps to manage backend DBs for my games so keeping to one helps. However, VS is not on Linux so Mono is the one for that OS by miles, again my opinon of cause.

 

I'm currently using VS 2015, it's the best in the world and natively supported in Unity 5.2 right off the bat. You may also be eligible to use VS 2015 CE, the community edition is the same as the big version, it's not crippled like express was.

VS for everything. There's zero downsides. If you don't currently have Unity 5.2 then any version of 5 will work fine with the microsoft Unity plugin, which is also free. It's just not necessary for the plugin in 5.2 because someone at Unity is super smart and made sure it's built in. Also, VS is much more stable than monodevelop.

A lot of people will say stuff like VS isn't the best but they are wrong and I am right.

 

MonoDevelop is a steaming pile of S***.

There's apparently a lot of work being done right now to update it - the current version is based on an ancient version of Xamarin Studio, so in the short future you can get MonoDevelop that's not ancient. See more here.

Still, my experience with MonoDevelop is bad. Formatting rules were limited and hard to figure out, formatting the document often jumped the cursor to the top of the document, the refactoring tools are a joke (extract method? You mean copy-paste the selected text to somewhere else?), and the default settings are atrocious.

Still, VS isn't that great. If you want a quality IDE, you kinda have to buy Resharper too. It's pretty expensive (200 Euros, I believe), but if you're a professional developer, you'll save the money on the pure effeciency of the tool.

I miss Java where there were a bunch of free, open-source IDE's that had all of the refactoring and ease-of-life features that you need. That VS has the audacity to take up to 10k USD for a tool that can't inline variables is amazing.

EDIT:
No idea about the builds, but you should probably be doing them from within the editor, not your IDE. EDITEDIT: unless you're talking about dlls, in which case it might matter, and I have absolutely no idea.

 

It seems that MS VS 2013/15 is the way to go.

Thanks guys!