After years of hearing about how great Visual Studio is in various weblogs and forum posts, I finally had a chance to try it out when I was asked to work on a .NET project last year for the first time. I was actually excited to see what this legendary IDE offered over other IDEs.
Sadly, it was a complete letdown. Poor key-binding customizability, poor search functionality, passable debugging features, and bugs in the product made for a miserable experience. In fact, I think C# is kind of cool and I can't say I hate the .NET platform, but I'd never go back to another .NET project after that experience -- like Cocoa, .NET is one of those frameworks that is very tightly coupled to its tools, and in a framework like that, if the tools are constantly getting in your way, the whole experience sucks for the developer.
If you want to see an example of shining greatness in an IDE, see IntelliJ IDEA. Since it's Java-only, I don't expect most people here will bother (and even a one-week trial isn't enough to really learn all of the things that make it great), but it's the best editing environment I've ever used, for any language or framework. Intuitive, customizable, packed with features, but most importantly, it doesn't get in your way.
by Erik — Feb 15
Sadly, it was a complete letdown. Poor key-binding customizability, poor search functionality, passable debugging features, and bugs in the product made for a miserable experience. In fact, I think C# is kind of cool and I can't say I hate the .NET platform, but I'd never go back to another .NET project after that experience -- like Cocoa, .NET is one of those frameworks that is very tightly coupled to its tools, and in a framework like that, if the tools are constantly getting in your way, the whole experience sucks for the developer.
If you want to see an example of shining greatness in an IDE, see IntelliJ IDEA. Since it's Java-only, I don't expect most people here will bother (and even a one-week trial isn't enough to really learn all of the things that make it great), but it's the best editing environment I've ever used, for any language or framework. Intuitive, customizable, packed with features, but most importantly, it doesn't get in your way.