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by BrandonWatson 6076 days ago
It's a funny thing...when people talk about iPhone development, many times they remard on the quality of the tools - specifically XCode. IMHO, XCode is good, but loses out in a comparison to Visual Studio Express. It's a really great, and free, offering.

When you start from VIM, Emacs or even TextMate, XCode is going to look good. Starting from the Visual Studio experience makes XCode look less stellar.
1 comments
jeremymcanally 6076 days ago
Well I think most of its shortcomings are due more to paradigm rather than quality of the tool. I love Visual Studio and I learned GUI development on Windows using it, so the general concept "feels" natural to me because that's how I learned. On the other hand, XCode works well for the way the GUI system works on OS X (i.e., outlets, actions, etc.).

I think it's a bit of Apples to Oranges, especially since (a) they view the GUI and code interaction quite differently and (b) .NET is managed whereas XCode's languages usually aren't, making the toolset behave differently (for example, the .NET debugger can do a lot more introspection than the XCode debugger can in some situations).

In any event, I dig VS.NET and use it for any Windows development I do. But I think your perspective is skewed a bit. I came from VS to these other tools and love them, but I'm a bit of a simplicity nut so it might just be my preferred workflow. :)

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