[brugidou]

.NET tooling can't compete with any unix + ruby tooling. I use .NET everyday I work with NuGet & co and it stinks. It is miles away from being mature and robust (even with VS2012).

I was a RoR dev before and loved it, now I just hate .NET at work because of it's OS (Windows) and tools (VS, NuGet, MSBuild...). We don't use MVC though.

[wes-exp]

I am a former C#/ASP.net programmer and I can confirm this. The thought of going back to the MS stack makes me cringe.

[s_kilk]

As a dual-wielding RoR/.Net dev, I'm on the fence about this, on the one hand MSbuild and Nuget are a pale immitation of the tools we find in Rub/posix/foss land, but I do think VS is quite a powerful tool when held correctly. Ultimately I enjoy working in both environments, but each for differnt reasons.

[irahul]

> tools (VS, NuGet, MSBuild...).

I don't know about NuGet or MSBuild, but back then when I used VS for misc tasks, it used to run circles around Eclipse or Netbeans.

[cheald]

VS is a really solid IDE - one of the best available, I'd say, if it supports what you're working in.

Rails really doesn't do "IDE" well, but that's because its entire toolchain is built to be used independently of an IDE.

(Edit: There's Rubymine, which is actually pretty decent, but I usually just stick with Sublime and my console because it ends up being faster anyhow)

[nicholassmith]

Running circles around Eclipse and Netbeans is not tricky really, they're both horrifying to use on a regular basis.

[irahul]

What else would you compare VS with then?

[nicholassmith]

Unfortunately VS does so many things that Netbeans and Eclipse are it's only real rivals, but in terms of being an excellent IDE Qt Creator is fantastic to use, but it's very driven to just be excellent as a C++/Qt IDE.

[vidarh]

A solid Unix/Linux command line.

I've yet to see an IDE that can beat the productivity of that, or even get close.

[irahul]

Take a Java or C# project and tell me what you can do with the CLI. Auto completion? Re-factoring(grep and replace doesn't cut it)? Code generation? I said Java and C#, because I don't know which IDE people use for dynamic languages, and if it is possible to offer accurate completion without executing the code(in some cases, it won't work even with code execution but there was an article from the VS python guys(I think) about offering completion without executing code) and reliable re-factoring(this isn't doable at all without confirming with the user).

[vidarh]

> Auto completion? Re-factoring(grep and replace doesn't cut it)? Code generation?

Auto-completion is an editor feature, and support for auto-completion in text-mode editors is not a problem, though I don't use it as I hate auto-complete with a vengeance. If you need to type enough for auto-complete to matter, your language and/or your identifier names are messed up.

Re-factoring and code generation are features I expect of the editor and/or external command line based generators respectively, and there's no reason for a heavy IDE.

I can understand people grab onto IDE's if forced to deal with ridiculously verbose languages like Java or C#, possibly. Yet another reason to stay away from these languages.