[brainling]

Visual Studio a) will never run on Unix, and b) is not required to do .NET development.

I know people who do their .NET work in Sublime Text with a nant build chain. It's not my preferred method, but it works great for them. Hell, I know a guy that uses ASP.NET to host an Angular app, and to unify his build system, he has Grunt pick up the heavy lifting of running his MSBuild files whenever he does the pre-deploy steps for his JavaScript.

If you think you need Visual Studio to do .NET development, it's because you fundamentally don't understand the technologies at play and just wanted to say something provocative and witty.

[lucidquiet]

The only reason I bring up Visual Studio is because most people don't even see the world out side of that IDE. "If it's not MS and it's not possible inside of Visual Studio it doesn't exist." That's how a whole lot of .NET developers, and .NET houses work -- and so that leads to my comment on VS.

[eropple]

> If you think you need Visual Studio to do .NET development, it's because you fundamentally don't understand the technologies at play and just wanted to say something provocative and witty.

On the off chance you're not just being knee-jerk and defensive because Something You Like is under fire--people think that VS is necessary because life is way too short to spend building something half as good as the other options in twice the time. I mean, could write Scala in TextMate, too, if I had the jones for it. But I could also not, and use IntelliJ, because I value having tools that are able to improve my productivity. (And decrease my frustration; by sticking with the JVM I have the benefit of not have to rely on Mono, whose GC, from experience, I do not trust in long-running processes; after spending a year owning a trivial Mono ASP.NET app that presented no end of troubles, I am very happy not needing to have a watchdog ready to kick it over when it undergoes its daily spaz-out.)

Xamarin Studio is not an acceptable product, either. I've been trying to use it for a couple weeks now and about ready to pitch a computer out a window--the basic functions of editing code are magnificently broken and have been for a long time. Random phantom line breaks in the editor that aren't in the code file, bad auto-indenting, phantom error highlighting, no partial-build error solving--and Visual Studio doesn't work on OS X. (To say nothing of the "you have to restart because XS forgot how to talk to xbuild" bugs...) That leaves the shitty bodges you well-actually'd your way into or not doing .NET at all. The latter makes a lot more sense for a lot more people.

I really enjoy C# and F# and I'd love to use .NET more if the frustrations in using it on not-Windows were not of such a magnitude. I am critical because it should be better and isn't. (Worse, Xamarin removed most reasons to contribute to the Mono ecosystem a while ago by making so much of the useful bits commercial, which is understandable--gotta eat--but also unfortunate.)

[pmelendez]

>"I mean, could write Scala in TextMate, too, if I had the jones for it. But I could also not, and use IntelliJ, because I value having tools that are able to improve my productivity."

I would argue that it would depend on the person behind the keyboard. I love VS but I happen to be working all day on vi at work and here I know colleges that are as fast or even faster than a lot of people relying on Intellisense. So my guess is that YMMV