But, no joke, it's a BETTER experience than Android Studio. I had a much better time using Xamarin Studio (on OS X) and Visual Studio with Xamarin (on Windows) than I ever did with Android Studio. And not just because of the tools: C# provides so many great features that make Android development awesome on it. And the API is essentially the same as the true Android Java API; I found myself googling "start an activity on Android" rather than "Xamarin start an activity on Android" because it's all done the same way.
I normally don't obsess about my code looking clean and beautiful, but when I wrote my simple app in C# it shorter and easier to read than when I did it in the Android Studio.
Visual Studio was first released in 1997, the company has 20 years experience in designing and building tooling. I believe they also have a very firm dogfooding policy, and some very intelligent people work there.
Google changed the search engine landscape and created the only competitor to the iPhone, but building tools and tooling is definitely not a key strength.
There are some incredibly annoying basic missing features in Chrome dev tools. Like you still can't just hover over a variable, you inexplicably need to highlight it. Functionality that IE dev toolbar had 10 years ago. And don't even get me started on their shitty black boxing solution, something that should be as easy as right clicking on the file you want to black box, but no, time for some bloody regex foo.
It's better than Firefox + IE, by it's not better than proper IDEs by a long shot. And it's got "designed by a programmer" written all over it, the UX is awful.
VS has the 'immediate window' which allows you to execute (almost) any statement within the context of the local scope, including intellisense and autocomplete.
I'm curious about Xamarin. I've been weary of cross platform tools since the days of trying to use phone gap but I understand the current gen of tools are much better.
I am okay with this.
...
Seriously, I have, right now, just dropped out of Vim into VSCode to debug a C program, because the VSCode debugger is fantastic. Everything just... works. In fact, I'd drop Vim in a heartbeat in favour of VSCode if only the vim keybindings were better, but right now they're pretty terrible and my fingers get confused. (Mercurial integration would be nice too, but mostly I use hg from the command line so I don't mind.)
I like the new Microsoft.
My chief complaint is that it takes less effort to grab an open compiler and get to work on 20 y.o. Fortran (for instance) than it takes to spin up the whole stack that this relatively trivial MVC app requires[-]. Some years ago I would have had to buy the Lahey Fujitsu Fortran compiler, but those days are over as far as I can tell.
Substantive greenfield projects (any platform) are marvelous by comparison; not even in the same ballpark.
[-] Note that most of the platform pain goes away if you're a fungible MS dev, but then there's a more subtle and insidious pain for you to deal with down the road.
MS released Rotor as a proof of concept. It's just an argument over implementations, which were admittedly lacking. And the standard parts are smaller than the whole .net bits MS shipped.