[mattmanser]

Better how?

C#'s one of the best languages in town and the IDE's the unchallenged best in town by a long way. And the SQL product is amazing, much better than MySlowQL.

So what bit is better? Deployment? Hosting? I'm genuinely asking here, you're just waving hands.

I've used both, the thing that puts me off .Net is the lack of choice when new stuff comes out (like elasticsearch, or a new language, or something like Docker) as it usually takes a year or so before it's easy to use on Windows, but that's about it.

[MrBuddyCasino]

I've used Visual Studio, XCode, Eclipse and IntelliJ - the thought that Visual Studio is the unchallenged king of them all never crossed my mind. Honestly curious - what makes it the best in our opinion?

[pionar]

I've used XCode and Eclipse before, so I have nothing to compare IntelliJ against.

The debugging experience is the key. The best thing a VS user can do to boost productivity substantially is learn how to use the debugging tools (navigating the stack, using Debug output messages, conditional breakpoints, the immediate window, autos and locals, etc.)

The plugin and extension community is awesome. There are two extensions every (web) developer needs - Web Essentials and Productivity Power Pack. These two are produced unofficially by MS teams as a platform for experimental features that may or may not make it into future VS versions.

Refactoring and code correctness is so much better in VS. Code Analysis, StyleCop, and third-party tools like Resharper make it a snap to analyze and correct code that may cause issues in the future.

This, and the planning tools that TFS gives us out of the box (whether you use git or the tfs vcs) is a boon to developer productivity.

Not to mention the great effort MS makes at backward compatibility. If you created an app in 2006, chances are it'll work on the latest version of .NET without much trouble.

[MrBuddyCasino]

Thanks for the detailed reply. One nitpick though: I've recently learned that .NET apps created for version 1.1 - 3.5 do not run on .NET v. 4.0+ - as a Java developer that was kind of surprising. You have to install a separate runtime, which affects Windows 8+ I think, since only v. 4.0/4.5 is installed.

[pionar]

Sorry, I should've said you can usually recompile the source against the latest .NET versions pretty easily.

[mreiland]

you can't have that discussion without talking about the tech stack you're working with.

Nothing beats the integration level between .Net and VS, and I don't care what tech stack you're using to compare.

But outside of .Net, for things like C++, javascript, etc, things get a lot murkier.

[pjmlp]

Which IDE beats VS in C++ editing and debugging capabilities?

[UK-AL]

IntelliJ, VS, Eclipse, xCode in that order.

[CmonDev]

You probably forgot to install ReSharper - an understandable mistake.

[darylteo]

The only way to fix Visual Studio is to turn it into IntelliJ via Resharper =)

[CmonDev]

...and then close eyes and pretend that IntelliJ supports C#, F#, Xamarin, UnityVS and other useful things.

[slowmotiony]

Obviously the technology of choice should be Node.js and Ember, duh!

[cwmma]

but postgres compared to sqlserver, you won't go back.