VS is (and has been since I know it) a great technical achievement. It more or less takes the pain out of Windows development. However, it's very Windows-centric (hardly unexpected) and Windows is really not relevant in my current work - mostly Python/Django on Linux on a mostly PHP/Java shop. I don't do C# nor deploy against .NET and it would take a lot of convincing before being allowed to deploy a Windows server in our farm. Even a deployment on Mono would have to be justified, since there isn't much difference, application-wise, between a Mono stack and a Java one.