Its been on mind for some days to express my gratitude to guys (teams) who make the most wonderful developement environment on planet. In college I used to program primarily in Visual Studio 6.0 with MFC, ATL etc and never saw the importance of IDE until I switched to Java when I started working on JavaCards at Schlumberger (now Axalto Inc). I simply loved Java. Its a revolutionary language and paved the way to another great technology (.NET) & fantastic language C# ...... (pioneers should be given there respect).
Anyways, things were okay with Java but what I missed always was an IDE, I think I tried almost all the IDEs .... from Borland, to disgusting Forte (from SUN) , Visual Cafe, JCreator, Eclipse but none come close to VS.NET.
Forte was the worst with zillions of windows. I think I liked Visual Cafe the most. I loved the simplicty of JCreator and admired its creator for making the IDE in C++ than in Java as most Java-IDE developers do. They simply do not understand Java is not a language to make IDEs.
I recently used Eclipse, for an open source effort its a great IDE but again once you have been charmed by Visual Studio it get tough to be pleased by others.
With Visual studio.NET my love story began when we started our .NET SmartCard effort in 2002 and since then its tough to imagine life with out it. Lot of thanks to VS teams at MSFT for such great IDE.