I used to develop .Net applications and I love that platform. MSDN is awesome and Visual Studio is hands down the best IDE. I know at least two startups that participated in BizSpark and they get lots of free goodies from MSFT.
I have used several versions of Visual Studio, and while it's not Eclipse/slow/broken, I never really saw why everyone loves the hell out of VS's IDE. Can you show me a page highlighting why it's so good? (Not trolling, really trying to understand the love).
What people like about VS is just how integrated everything is. You can replicate most of the functionality but there is a lot to be said for 'just works' when your in the middle of crunch time.
One of the great things Visual Studio has is the ability to set breakpoints in JavaScript code just like you can for C# code. Not that you can't do that in Eclipse, but it works out of the box vary easily. It's tightly integrated with TFS which let's you check in code resolve bugs in a single step. That way if a similar bug crops up later you can find what the problem was last time and how it was fixed vary quickly. It's also got a vary nice debugger that let's you do things like change values at run time.
Eclipse might not have any up-front monetary costs, but it has costs in lost productivity while waiting on it (which would arguably cost you more than a closed source license when applied to the value of a developer's time).
It's gotten better, but it still has a ways to go.
My machine is beefed up so I'm sure someone else's cost using less powerful machine (Intel P3 or something...) is more than mine. Ditto with VS.NET 2010 or future version of Microsoft IDE when used in older machines.
Shall we count the cost of using plugins as well? Including OS boot time and such and such?
Sorry, what I mean to say is that I don't know what you're talking about of this "waiting on it".
There's also IntelliJ, an IDE from the guys that make Resharper. We moved from Eclipse to IntelliJ a few years ago and aren't looking back. It "just works", has (had?) more reliable and advanced refactoring, and the support for other languages (like JavaScript, Python and Ruby refactoring and debugging) is/was far ahead of Eclipse.
