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?
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.
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.
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.