It’s definitely an emotive topic this one. Visual Studio does a lot of what Power BI Desktop does (in the Tabular Modelling world), Power BI Desktop however does more in that it can produce Power BI Report content. I’ve yet to see this happen in Visual Studio so if you have figured it out I will happily stand corrected.
For me in my personal experience, Visual Studio leads you to having to use Azure Analysis Services, this then becomes an extra layer that you will have to your reports, not to mention an extra cost. Under the hood, Power BI and Azure Analysis Services are very similar if not identical (depends on who you speak to) , so why not use a single layer instead of two? My personal view is that Paul Turley is 100% spot on here, the development of Azure and the tools that are available in Power BI Desktop (and the service) can replicate everything you get from Visual Studio. The most important thing here to my mind and something that is often forgotten is the community is embracing Power BI Desktop, that means when my customers come to me and as how can they do things, I can set them up in Power BI Desktop and point them to all the resources (I’ll add some to this article as I’m also preparing a “Getting help” section to the site), and they can then be up and running fairly quickly, when confronted with Visual Studio (apart form the cost aspect – you can’t use the free versions for production work remember) there’s a huge learning curve as it just isn’t the same as the familiar Power BI Desktop. So for me, I agree with Paul.
https://sqlserverbi.blog/2020/07/03/i-am-done-using-visual-studio/
Other Resources
SQL Server BI – Paul Turley’s own site
https://sqlserverbi.blog/
SQL BI
https://sqlbi.com/
Guyinacube – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFp1vaKzpfvoGai0vE5VJ0w
Microsoft Power BI –
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy–PYvwBwAeuYaR8JLmrfg