What is so great about Visual Studio?

user_1034 0
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In my admittedly somewhat short time as programmer, I have used many development environments on many platforms. Most notably, Eclipse/Linux, XCode/OSX, CLI/editor/Linux, VisualDSP/Blackfin/Windows and MSVC/Windows. (I used each one for several months)

There are neat features in pretty much all of them. But somehow, I just can't find any in MSVC. Then again, so many people really seem to like it, so I am probably missing something here. So please tell me: What is so great about Visual Studio?

Things I like:

  • Refactoring tools in Eclipse
  • Build error highlighting in XCode and Eclipse
  • Edit-all-in-Scope in XCode
  • Profiler in XCode
  • Flexibility of Eclipse and CLI/editor
  • Data plotting in VisualDSP

Things I don't like

  • Build error display in MSVC (not highlighted in code)

Honestly, this is not meant to be a rant. Of course I am a Mac-head and biased as hell, but I have to use MSVC on the job, so I really want to like it.

xcode visual-studio eclipse
17 Answers

IMHO, Visual Studio has one of the best debuggers in the business. Much easier to use than the many graphical frontends to gdb out there.

user_1351780

After close to 10 years using and loving Visual Studio up to version 2008, I have been doing some Java development in Eclipse for a few months and I am quite surprised that, in my opinion, Eclipse is a much more advanced IDE. I just miss a lot of features when I go back to VS.

Perhaps the people that think VS is the best haven't used any other modern IDE lately.

Sergio_Acosta_29540

If you are using Visual Studio for C or C++ programming, you should really look into Visual Assist X. It adds refactoring and better syntax highlighting and a few extra things.

If you are using Subversion for version-control, you should also look into VisualSVN (best) or AnkhSvn (free).

With those add-ons you might find Visual Studio more to your liking.

Rasmus_Faber_55420

'Out of the box', I can write a program without having to go through all the hooplah of installing CDT (or whatever other tools). This is a real PITA for Ubuntu and not much better on windows. (The updates never seem to work right, there are always stupid package incompatibility problems, or special install steps).

The environment 'feels' natural to windows and non-clunky, and that lack of awkwardness counts a lot toward productivity. Shortcuts are common with other windows apps, window behavior is the same, etc.

VS is also not cluttered by a crapload of windows when you open a project. I'm sure that there are ways to save the perspectives in Eclipse so you don't have to do this every time, but it is an extra step.

Andrew_163910

Visual Studio Team System Data Base Edition - all the tools you need: code editor with designer, Source Control, Team View and , what's best - Data Base deployment!

user_1154660

I use both Delphi and Visual Studio. While I prefer Delphi (for a lot of reasons), there are some things that Visual Studio does better.

  • The code editor works better, making writing code smoother, and therefore faster.
  • The help. It's faster, returns more relevant results and is better integrated into IDE.

It's more of a .Net thing than Visual Studio, but I'm really liking ASP.Net, so I'd have to call that another win for VS.

And for bonus points, I'm also a big fan of Delphi Prism, which is hosted in Visual Studio.

So, if you're writing code for Windows, there are a lot of things to like in the Visual Studio IDE.

user_191830

I tried using VS2010 for working on a Great Plains / eConnect project, and it kept crashing on me.

I would like to like this IDE, but I can't even use it right now. VS2010 has the featureset I need to work on the above (with the newest versions).

user_2951120

I like VS because it is the more responsive one (runs circles around Eclipse for instance). I'm still using 2005 though and not looking forward to the upgrade to 2010 (we skip every other release, so not 2003 and no 2008 here).

user_681050
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