If you are developing on a Windows platform, Visual Studio is the best IDE I've found. Full stop.
Say what you want about all their other software, about their operating system, business practices, etc. Microsoft does take care of their developers.
Say what you want about all their other software, about their operating system, business practices, etc. Microsoft does take care of their developers.
This is only true if you work not only _on_ that platform but also only _for_ the Windows platform.
Of course you can also create portable applications with Visual Studio, and some free portable libraries such as SDL provide some VC project files. But if you're using lots of portable libraries and/or a huge portable framework like Qt or GTK, you are in big trouble with Visual Studio.
Also, the Visual C++ compiler has some standard-deviating behavior (most notably the issues with the for statement) thats makes it unnecessarily hard to write portable code in the first place.
So for all but the simplest scenario (developing on Windows and for Windows only), Visual Studio fails to provide some essential qualities, for which all the other nice feature simply can't make up.