What do you like about Visual Studio 08?

Question

It seems that many of the developers on SO are really satisfied with Visual Studio 08. This make me curious, what features separate VS08 from the other IDEs that you have used? Are there features within VS that can't be found elsewhere? Is it ease-of-use? Speed of development? Anything else?

Answer 1

Good JavaScript debugging and intellisense.

With 3.5sp1 the Team Foundation Server integration has really improved as well.

Great extensibility that supports development in range of many different languages as well as community plugin support.

WCF support with Service References and debugging/configuration tools.

CIDER WPF previewing and XAML intellisense.

LINQ intellisense

Framework targeting... the ability to select a specific version of the .NET framework you want the output of your project to be compatible with

Answer 2

That it is extensible enough for a plugin like ViEmu.

Answer 3

WPF and Silverlight Support (Cider and XAML intellisence)

Answer 4

I think the key is to use whatever IDE is best suited for the languages/technology you're developing for. As an ASP.NET/C#/Javascript developer I see Visual Studio as the best choice because nothing else integrates with all of those technologies any better that I've found.

If I do Java or PHP I choose Eclipse or Netbeans depending on what I'm looking to accomplish.

Javascript intellisense is a pretty killer feature for me though. I know Eclipse can do it also, but having it built into the IDE I do my primary development in really helps.

Answer 5

LINQ Support is a great addition and time saver in most of the programming scenarios

Answer 6

Working Build Sounds.

Answer 7

Visual Studio 2008 is OK, but its refactoring sucks. With Resharper 4 plugged in though its fantastic - couldn't ask for much more.

Answer 8

I like its robust extensibility options, like add-ons, snippets, etc. I realize that this was also available in 2005, but with the added XAML visualizer it beats out 2005 any day.

Answer 9

Visual Studio being rock-solid stable, at least in my experience, is certainly a plus!

Eclipse, by comparison, is generally pretty solid, but I've had it run out of memory and crash on occasion when doing something like editing a complex .jsp page; Eclipse seems to get confused when there are lots of instances of opening-closing tag pairs where one tag is hard-coded in the HTML and the matching tag is written out dynamically by the Java code. I haven't ever run into this type of problem (where the IDE slows down and eventually crashes) with Visual Studio while editing similar pages in ASP.Net.

I also really like the Ctrl+Tab (and Ctrl+Shift+Tab) tab-switching behavior in Visual Studio, where tab order is most-recently-used order. I install the Firefox add-on LastTab on all of my machines, which gives Firefox Ctrl+Tab behavior very similar to that of Visual Studio.

Answer 10

What I like is the fact that I can install ReSharper. Only with ReSharper (or any other similar tool) you get a powerful IDE. With ReSharper you get:

• on-the-fly error detection (like VB6), code inspections, solution wide analysis
• quick fixes (add missing reference, namespace, declare a variable, etc.)
• source code navigation (see all classes that implement a given interface, all classes that derive from a given class, etc.)
• unit test framework integration
• ...

It's 2008! Shouldn't the IDE be better than syntax-highlighting? Don't get me wrong. Visual Studio is a great tool but I can't imagine working in it for a whole day without ReSharper. :-)

PS: It's a shame that most of the .NET developer only know Visual Studio and will swear how great the tool is. They often don't reallize what other IDEs can offer (Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc.)

Answer 11

The new sort and remove unused usings feature, the power commands that have been written for it, the new error highlighting in SP1, the source server support for debugging .NET, the built-in unit testing. That's off the top of my head.

Answer 12

XAML editor is nice, especially after SP1.