[_ivvf]

I developed at a Windows-centric shop for several years using C# and Visual Studio, and I can personally attest, at least in 2013, that stock Visual Studio is pretty far behind Java IDEs in its capabilities. At the time everyone I talked to recommended I get my manager to get me a copy of ReSharper, but it wasn't in our team's budget. At least in 2013, here's where I remember C# IDE support was lacking:

* No automatic incremental compilation. It turns out, this feature is specific to Eclipse alone. In my current job I'm forced to use Intellij and cannot figure out for the life of me why people think Intellij is better. Automatic incremental compilation is a game changer and only Eclipse has it.

* Limited Code analysis and search. For instance checkout this SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/282377/visual-studio-how-.... This kind of symbolic analysis and code search feels essential to me in an IDE, and stock Visual studio just didn't seem to have it beyond the basics.

* Weak refactoring and code generation support. ReSharper might bridge the gap a little here, but stock Visual Studio felt way behind.

* Weak ecosystem for plugins and tool integration. With Java IDEs I have excellent integration with unit test frameworks, code coverage tools, checkstyle, my command-line build tool, etc. I remember it taking a fair bit of effort just to be able to run NUnit tests in Visual Studio. Why NUnit? Well, our software needed to build on Linux with Mono so we needed to use a cross-platform unit testing framework instead of the one built into visual studio.

As a side note, I think the plugins ecosystem is another area where Eclipse has an edge over Intellij. For instance, when I tried Intellij's code coverage tool I eventually gave up on it because it had a critical bug I couldn't diagnose that resulted in incorrect code coverage being displayed.

[ptx]

Kotlin has incremental compilation since 1.0.2 last year, both in IntelliJ and Gradle: https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2016/05/kotlin-1-0-2-is-he...

...and in Maven since 1.1.2: https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2017/04/kotlin-1-1-2-is-ou...

[breischl]

A lot of this has been at least partially addressed since VS2015. There is built-in code search (ie, "find me any language construct with these letters in it"), there's support for basic refactorings (rename, extract method, extract interface, etc). I got used to all the built-in stuff before someone talked my into Resharper, and found most of the built-in stuff is actually better these days. Faster, anyway.

There's always been codegen support with snippets, although I never found too much need for it, personally.

The tools ecosystem is pretty weak though. I always found TestDriven.NET to be the best test runner, although Resharper's is OK if slow. I actually like NUnit a lot better than JUnit, but YMMV.

[cja]

My bosses never understood ReSharper so I bought it myself. Worth it just to reduce my frustration at work.

[UK-AL]

I know that Roslyn the C# compiler visual studio taps into defiantly does support incremental compilation.