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Comment by fuj | Hacker News Reader

This is nice, but no... it will never replace VS. I'm sorry if I sound arrogant, but if anyone disagrees than they either never used VS or don't know its potential. I'm no MS fanboy, but VS is simply the best IDE.

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No, it isn't. It's the best IDE for C# on a windows OS. Important to have those qualifiers.

I would really love to have a better alternative for C++ development.

As a Linux user, and someone who really dislikes having to boot into Windows in general, even I must admit that there is nothing close to Visual Studio for developing in C++.

I disagree. Unless you have some trivial C++ project (<100KLOC) you have to buy the plugin from whole tomato for a 1000$ for VS to be at all usable (at least last time I had to use VS - has this changed?). Power tools and a couple of other plugins and you just about get the functionality that other IDEs have built in. As nice as various specialised things like remote debugging on xbox, compile on the fly etc. are - overall it's pretty sluggish and limited when it comes to customisation.

Opinions, opinions, opinions...

Usually calling something the best is entirely subjective, but I believe due to the closed ecosystem surrounding Visual Studio, competitors don't stand a chance regardless of how bloated and cumbersome it is.

It's also interesting how analogous that situation is to many others concerning walled gardens in computing.

> best is entirely subjective

Indeed. For starters, I won't run on a Mac. Or Linux. Or BSD. Does it do Java as well as Eclipse or NetBeans? Can I write Clojure code with it?

FWIW, you can write Clojure (clojure-clr) code with Visual Studio: http://dev.clojure.org/display/doc/Getting+Started+with+CLR+...

Yeah, I agree. VS is still better, which is why I said in the article I wont use sharpdevelop in my professional work, but for someone who doesn't want too or can't afford to buy into VS then sharpdevelop is a much better option than VS Express imho.

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