[krig]

For me, it's two things in particular: 1. Reliability - I have had so many issues with debugging especially C++ using GDB where GDB will get completely confused, whereas Visual Studio is able to do a decent job even on heavily optimized code. However, I understand that GDB has improved in this aspect. 2. User interface. Having the debugger also be a visual code editor is really nice. It's difficult to articulate just how nice it is to someone used to a command-line based interface. Being able to create analytic scripts is nice. With VS I've rarely felt the need, it's basic tools are good enough. They are terrible, don't get me wrong, but they are better than any interfaces available for GDB.