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.