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by JoelAnair 4651 days ago
You're going to hate this answer, but after a couple of years of Node/Express development I'm really enjoying writing Asp.NET in C# using Visual Studio 2013.
4 comments

I'd love to hear your reasons for this, as I've been looking at moving away from the Microsoft stack. Thanks!
I like the IDE (a lot). I'm not reinventing anything, just doing web development. Visual Studio gives you every tool you need to get the job done in one package that's frequently updated and runs stably and consistently (on my machine). The individual tools may not be better than their OSS equivalents, but as an overall ecosystem they are fairly well-tested and work together extremely well in my experience. NuGet is very cool and easy to use.

The end result for me has been that I spend significantly less time wondering why things aren't working (almost none, really) and more time actually writing and improving my code.

If you are doing something groundbreaking or way-out-of-the-box, Visual Studio is probably not a great choice. But for workaday web developers like me it's reliable, easy, and has objectively made me more productive compared to Node/Express/Backbone.

I have been using Microsoft technologies for many years, and I don't believe I will change it. Microsoft technologies are quite mature.
Can't argue with the best set of development and debugging enterprise tools under single umbrella.
Web Forms or MVC?
He says he's enjoying it, so it must be MVC.
Yeah, MVC. WebForms look a little painful, but most of the pluses of Visual Studio still apply IMO.