Re : VS used to be good

I still think that VS has an extremely good debugger, and (perhaps obviously) I understand the integraton with Microsoft technologies to be excellent.. however remember where this comes from..

..until Borland released Delphi VS was widely reguarded as an overly complex pile of dung, with a very un-intuitive and un-friendly GUI builder. One developer of front-ends to control systems I spoke to reckoned on a 10-fold increase in productivity transitioning to Delphi. It has come a long way since then but I really can't see it ever exceeded other tools as a GUI builder (such as Delphi/C++ Builder) to any great degree - if at all.

All that aside - the obvious lack of any cross-platform support in VS can severely limit it's use in any case - no problem if you're a Microsoft shop but some of the most pervasive and technical industries have little or no MS usage, so it *can* be an issue.

The Netbeans IDE in Sun Studio has also come a long way as a general purpose IDE and the profiling and memory checking interfaces are very useful tools that i've not seen an equivalent of in other IDE's.

Eclipse sounds good from those that use it - personally I find it's interface and methodology far too complex to be bothered to learn and the lack of any real debugging capabilities make it a complete non-starter for C/C++ based work.. a common problem with a number of cross-platform IDE's IME.

Personally, for C++ GUI creation I find QtDesigner difficult to beat, the ease of use as a RAD tool for Python programs is an added bonus too. YMMV.