I could switch languages more easily than I could switch dev environment. The lock in to me is bssically simply that there aren't many other good language+IDE combos out there. There are plenty of languages that are interesting but very few come with a great IDE. I'd love to do Rust or Haskell all day, but I'm sure as hell not going to vim/emacs/sublime from VS. I almost envy those who never started using and IDE and can be productive with a text editor, their threshold to switch language is much Lower. Luckily VS at least supports C++, F#, JS and python so it's not impossible to cover quite a lot of languages in it.
I tried out Resharper for the entire evaluation period and then dropped it. There were a few nice things, but nothing that was just leaps and bounds better than built in VS features. But everyone says it's necessary, so I keep wondering if I somehow missed the killer features.
What are the features of Resharper that make you say VS isn't complete without it?
One of the big ones to me is "move class to its own file". Means when you are sketching up some multi-class API or something you can just type away in a single source file, and as soon as something looks half-finihshed I just alt enter and it creates a new file with the correct name and moves the type to that file including adding the necessary imports to the header. A lot of context-switch time gained.
Next big thing is navigation. Go to type, go to symbol and go to file are super quick and means I never go to the source tree to navigate the solution.
I didn't find the "move class" feature while I was trialing, but it does sound pretty handy.
Symbol search is incredibly useful, that was a revelation when somebody told me about it. But Visual Studio has had that since at least 2010, I think maybe 2008. Resharper's is a bit more complete, but I think the VS built-in one is a bit faster. The VS native implementation is Edit -> Navigate To, the default key combo is ctrl-comma, but I think Resharper takes that combo for its own purposes.
In my experience it isn't one, two, or even three killer features. It's the aggregate additional polish and productivity increase gleaned from 10 to 20 minor features that shave fractions of seconds and remove a click or two off of incredibly common actions. And I just use the default settings.
I've tried it a few times now, and never stuck with it.
I think it's because I find the VS interface incredibly cluttered anyway, and Resharper just makes it worse. The right click menus are already 10 miles long filled with useless clutter and when it starts mucking around with the already edging towards overwhelming intellisense pop-ups it just annoyed me one too many time.
After 2 weeks of trialling it then only thing I was really using was the "go to implementation..." but I've long since given up on the ridiculousness of making everything mockable anyway so it's only occasionally useful.
The worst thing about VS is how slow it can be sometimes, even on incredibly powerful machines. In the end it's a glorified text editor and everything should be secondary to that.
There's nothing more annoying than pressing ctrl-f (find) and then have it pause for 1/2 a second because it's trying to parse a massive html tree for intellisense you don't even need because you're just trying to delete a single node you know the name of.
I agree the slowness of find (Ctrl+F) and the slowness of the xml/html parsers is still the worse thing about it. I can see how tag soup is hard to parse, but well formed xml should parse in milliseconds. On the bright side, with a good go-to-symbol, go-to-file, go-to-type etc., I search much less for free text.
The text editor is only a tiny part of an IDE, the bits that are added are quite important. Integrated debugging (with edit+continue while debugging), integrated version control interface, integrated build system, integrated profiler and much more makes it so much more productive than having to e.g. do debugging with recompile/restart turnaround times.
The text editor is by and far the most important part of the IDE and is the only part everyone will use.
It's also the thing that's most important to flow, to producing, not navigating or testing.
That it can pause and stutter when you're just trying to do a simple edit is pretty silly.
I love VS and it's one of the things I always miss whenever using something else, but there's a lot of annoyances and a lot of sub-par features and some you should never use features.
I notice you said "integrated version control interface", if you're talking about TFS, it's terrible. Stop using it. The interface is terrible, all generic tables that you can't tell apart. It's a massive effort to see file changes. And worse than all of that, the actual version control system is shockingly bad, even compared to SVN, let alone Git. You're a madman to be using TFS, it's so bad.
> Integrated debugging (with edit+continue while debugging)
That's the main reason to use an IDE, in my mind, along with the ability to display the call sites of a function.
> integrated version control interface,
Never noticed any advantage compared to a shell with git or git-svn, personally.
> integrated build system
Depends what you mean by that. What's precious is the ability to detect errors before doing a build or testing anything. "Integrated build systems" in general I find often fall flat on their face when something outside of the IDE touches the files.
I'm curious. What do you find so great about Visual Studio? After working with it for a while, I came to the conclusion that while it's extremely fast, it's not particularly full-featured compared to Eclipse. The amount of refactoring you can do out of the box is minimal, and the search is ridiculously crippled.
I haven't lived with it long enough to find out if it's as easy to break as Eclipse when you install the wrong combination of plugins, though. Oddly enough, its vim emulator plugin is much better than what I found for Eclipse, which I find quite ironic.
