As a developer that used countless IDEs, Eclipse is one of the worse ones I've used. It's got all the stuff in place to be just as good as VS, but a serious integration issue where all that stuff is not used to the extent it should be. Code::Blocks was a better IDE to use in Linux than Eclipse was, it was kinda clunky as well but not nearly as bad.
Visual Studio is just a spectacular IDE, especially VS2008 (2010 is a disaster and a downgrade in a lot of ways). Never seen any editor that had syntax highlighting so customizable, which is a massive help when dealing with very complex code. The intellisense takes a lot of typing error out of the equation with it's ability to peel back types and differentiate between functions and variables by context of usage. XML documentation comments make it a hell of a lot easier to figure out what that function you wrote and forgot about does as soon as it appears in the intellisense menu. Having object and class views that can remain open and don't require recompiling to update is a huge help in finding some odd function you suspect is in the library your using but not sure about exact name or overload to use. It's just crammed with so many features that take all the grunt work out of programming and leave you with the real work of writing code and solving problems. It's also got a wicked library of add-ons and extensions built up from having such a large user base that pretty much anything you need is just a search away. Even when I'm developing on Linux I usually have a VM open running visual studio 2008 and some add-ons that redirect the linking/compilation to a console session and errors/warnings back to visual studio (roundabout way of doing things, but it works fantastically).
Visual Studio is just a spectacular IDE, especially VS2008 (2010 is a disaster and a downgrade in a lot of ways). Never seen any editor that had syntax highlighting so customizable, which is a massive help when dealing with very complex code. The intellisense takes a lot of typing error out of the equation with it's ability to peel back types and differentiate between functions and variables by context of usage. XML documentation comments make it a hell of a lot easier to figure out what that function you wrote and forgot about does as soon as it appears in the intellisense menu. Having object and class views that can remain open and don't require recompiling to update is a huge help in finding some odd function you suspect is in the library your using but not sure about exact name or overload to use. It's just crammed with so many features that take all the grunt work out of programming and leave you with the real work of writing code and solving problems. It's also got a wicked library of add-ons and extensions built up from having such a large user base that pretty much anything you need is just a search away. Even when I'm developing on Linux I usually have a VM open running visual studio 2008 and some add-ons that redirect the linking/compilation to a console session and errors/warnings back to visual studio (roundabout way of doing things, but it works fantastically).
