[hermitdev]

I've been a long time VS user. Started with Visual C++ 6... In my experience, it's never been a straight forward conclusion of version X is better than the one before. With each release, it does somethings better, or new, but others worse, sometimes cripplingly so. And one of the most frustrating things for the longest time was that if you needed a specific C++ compiler major version, you were stuck using the specific VS version that shipped with the compiler (unless you were willing to ditch projects and go with makefiles). Only in 2019 did that finally change. And speed of the IDE itself has been dodgy at times, even for brand new projects. I've tried the 2022 preview (I have not yet tried RTM), and there are excruciating pauses in the UI for seconds to create a new file in an empty project! But, there are great new features in there, too...

Like Pretzold, I have a love hate relationship with IntelliSense. I think I can boil down my gripes with this: IntelliSense is wonderful for consuming APIs. It is an active hindrance for writing/designing APIs. It is great for telling you about what exists, but falls on its face when you're trying to write something new. If I am undoing the suggestions I didn't want, yet it insisted on placing, it is counterproductive. Personally, I get rather tired of slapping the escape key to cancel IntelliSense multiple times just so I can write out a dotted expression.