It was not just about C# editing. There were other things being used in Visual Studio at that time. Also being inexperienced in VB.NET (my first job) surrounded by 10 other seasoned devs, they discouraged anything outside of Visual Studio. I understand why when looking back.

This was also the Visual SourceSafe days. How I do not miss that!

C# wiggled its way in eventually.

Back in 2008, I was pretty much using Emacs for most programming languages. The only exception was C# and Javascript.

As the years pass to now, I rarely use a programming language outside of emacs. I have enough years in my career to not tell me what I can and cannot do to get things done.