Reading these posts about the "excellent, bug free" VS development environment: in my experience, this isn't quite the truth.
I've used VS6 since the late 90's, mostly on small projects (less than ~10 000 lines, four or five source files) until 2004, where I signed up to work maintenance on what is essentially a very large codebase (thousands of source files, between 500-50 000 lines per file). In 2006, my frustration with VS6's inability to handle a codebase of this magnitude finally convinced me to try a different IDE toolset. My specific complaints:
- Starting VS6 is slow, and brings the computer to a halt.
- Compiling & linking through the IDE is slow, and brings my computer to a halt. This doesn't happen when run from the commandline, nor, as follows, from a subprocess within Emacs.
- Intellisense stops working a lot; nothing breaks programming flow like having your favorite crutch be unavailable for half the methods (this seems to affect large files more than small). Incidentally, though Emacs has Intellisense type functionality, I much prefer the generic completion available in Emacs/Vim (M-/ in Emacs, Ctrl-N in Vim), as it works within comments and for undefined/undeclared (and unprocessed) structures.
- The method navigation panel fails often, with it listing a method correctly, but displaying "method not found" when selected (the workaround is to select different methods until one is found, then jump around the file for the desired method). I suspect this is related to the parser not handling default arguments correctly in certain cases.
Finally, VS is the only application that has blue-screened my XP machine (this happened only twice, however, and wasn't involved in my decision to migrate to a different toolset).
Regarding software, either you bend software to meet your needs, or it bends you to meet its limitations. Unfortunately, because VS has a high difficulty regarding the former, I found I was consistently having to integrate workarounds into my day to day coding practices.