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Comment by nw | Hacker News Reader

I dare say Microsoft has the best IDE out there.

It does, as it works for a lot of people just fine, but it's not without it's quirks.

Some things that are better in XCode: filtering of options, error bubbles, keyboard mappings.

Some things that are better in MSVC: Debugging! Maybe because I had to use MSVC for the last 10 years, and I'm so used to it. XCode is also not bad, but would need more time adjusting to the keyboard shortcuts

Some things that are better in Eclipse: refactorings. Adding method parameters, changing their order, extracting methods, promoting or demoting classes, etc. At least when it comes to Java, Eclipse seems to have more options and a greater success rate than VS2008 with C#.

Debugging Java with Eclipse is about the same as debugging C# with VS in my experience, though it seems that VS's output console is slower than Eclipse's, and both are slower than a pure terminal.

I hate Eclipse

I have to use both Eclipse and VS2k3/VS2k8/VS2k10 on a daily basis. Sure, eclipse has better refactorings. I would also argue that it's References/Declarations search features are better than the VS equivelents.

But that is the only two features where VS gets eclipsed. VS is an all-round better tool than Eclipse for everything else I need to do. Sure perhaps I can make Eclipse better by searching out some plugin written by some 3rd party, because the 3rd party support/community is better for Eclipse than VS. But from a daily use POV, atleast IMO, VS is simply leaps and bounds beyond Eclipse. VS also cost me $1000, Eclipse didn't cost me anything. So perhaps my view is skewed simply because I'm deluding myself because of my financial outlay, but I'd like to think not.

I don't know about keyboard mappings. I'd rather press F10 to step through code rather than apple key + Shift + P or whatever it is. I'd also rather press F5 to debug than apple key + enter. I also like that tab in visual studio tabs lines if you highlight them instead of replacing them with a tab like xcode does.

Actually I kind of put it wrong - I like Visual Studio debugging keys better, as I spent most of time debugging, but for typing (and since I've moved to emacs for my linux) I prefer XCode (it's not the same but closer).

I hate XCode debugging mappings (but I haven't debug enough on it) :)

If and only if you are targeting Windows and Windows only.

Or, assuming this is true, Mac OS X or iPhone.

It's not, just as much as VS2010 is not the best IDE

Funny how moderation on topics that mention Microsoft is so predictable

They do, and I don't think that's going to change, because Microsoft has a team of developers whose job is to write the software that they use to write software.

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