Ernst Wolthaus

Not to start a flame war, but in what situations are VS.NET better than Java IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse or NetBeans? I've only spent a year developing in VB.Net so I might have missed out on a lot of good things in VS.Net, but it is rare that a whole day goes by without VS.Net doesn't hang or the application doesn't start on the first try with when started in debugging mode (leading to yet another verification that the files doesn't need to be recompiled before starting it again). When starting nunit-gui from the debugger to be able to debug/examine the unit tests, there is a 10% chance that the whole VS.Net hangs, having to kill it with the task manager... We develop a client/server solution where some projects are shared between the client and server solutions (to make the startup of VS.Net not so incredibly slow). We can't have both "solutions" open at the same time due to file locking, so we have to close one solution and open the other, which takes forever! All of these are little time thieves that together steal an hour a day for us. The tool would have to have some really good features to help us make up that lost time, but so far I've found little besides the stored procedure debugger (which can't view temporal tables...) that is of any value to me. For pure GUI applications (and perhaps web applications that I do not developed), perhaps it is good, I don't know, but for pure "coding" there isn't much there, even navigating between different files is a PITA. A simple keep X files open, close the LRU seemed to be a too hard setting for them. When VS.Net 2003 came out, I used IntelliJ IDEA which was, and still is a pure joy to program in. Who calls this method? A keystroke away and I got a real list of possible callers, not just a textual search. Refactoring was as easy as cut & paste. There was lots of warnings about code that is probably incorrect, unlike VB.Net where even errors are sometimes accepted (like having the same case-target twice in a switch/select statement)... And so on. Today all the major IDEs for Java are leaps beyond what I've used of VS.Net. But as I've said, I've only used it for a year and 99% of the time it has been for writing code, not GUI nor web-work. Perhaps it is much better if one uses C#?