I've heard many people say exactly that (or even that VS is simply the best IDE). I somehow fail to see why would anyone say that.
The whole solution/project model seems to be optimized for something that does not make much sense to me.
The UI is mostly unusable on small screens.
Integrated editor feels somewhat weird to me (I'm probably too addicted to emacs' electric-indent, but even then).
Thus I may see some reason to use VS for .NET projects (VS being the "native" IDE), but I completely fail to see why one would use VS for C/C++ (which is even exaggerated by various quirks of MS's compiler, like not supporting C99 and different versions of stdlib that sometimes can be used at same time and sometimes can't).
For me, the small screen is not an issue, because I typically develop on as much screen as I can muster.
As far as the editor, there are some good attempts at code completion from other systems, but I have not found one nearly as good as Intellisense. That is coupled with the jump to definition and declaration.
Also, the integrated debugging and some of the edit and continue functionality is amazing.
The whole solution/project model seems to be optimized for something that does not make much sense to me.
The UI is mostly unusable on small screens.
Integrated editor feels somewhat weird to me (I'm probably too addicted to emacs' electric-indent, but even then).
Thus I may see some reason to use VS for .NET projects (VS being the "native" IDE), but I completely fail to see why one would use VS for C/C++ (which is even exaggerated by various quirks of MS's compiler, like not supporting C99 and different versions of stdlib that sometimes can be used at same time and sometimes can't).