It's patently false that the profiling and system monitoring tools you can get on Windows are years ahead of anything you can get on a different platform. In fact, it's the opposite [1, 2]. And I wont even get into the fact that we're still catching up to 30 year old Lisp machines in the areas of editor integration, debuggers, and code assistance.
I'll take my separation + hooks for launching any day over massive integration that means doing what you want is hard / impossible.
ie, even MS's own products don't play nicely with each other. But you're more stuck with them than you would be with something more atomic and disconnected.
That's real nice for you, but what VS does is bring it out-of-the-box to everyone. Way to miss the point.
In no other creative or engineering profession is there this expectation that the most advanced tools are shrink wrapped together. Who gives a shit if you can buy paint together with your brushes? Just buy the best damn paint and brushes you can find, regardless of who sells them.
But my point stands: if you do want the fully-integrated IDE experience, VS is state-of-the-art, there's nothing like it on any other platform. That is why I don't say "better" or "worse" I say "not comparable".
Valgrind has KDevelop on Linux.
Personal main peeve: the debugger is far from intuitive, frequently chops off strings in the inspector w/o giving any way to read the rest of them (no magnifying glass), and offers no way to test anything which cannot be done in a single line of code - ie, anything to do with enumerators, and nearly 1/2 the .NET framework I've encountered.
Windows 7 seems to be full of things like that; most programs still have the classic menu strip at the top; Office has a sort of one with the Ribbon and hides parts of it under that logo thing; Explorer doesn't have one at all any more and Paint has a Ribbon too but a funny blue lozenge instead of a logo.
I would contend that Ubuntu Lucid is rather more consistent than that; every preinstalled app I've used is GTK-based so they all look pretty much the same.
I'm just pushing through this aspect of the project so I can get back to linux kernel driver hacking, which is now looking like summer vacation.
Xcode is far superior to microsoft's development tools. I think you're simply exhibiting stockholm syndrome. Please go back to developing only for windows. Thank you.
That really is where he's coming from. I worked at Microsoft a few years back, with some Vista and IM guys, and none of them used Visual Studio, despite pleas for feedback from DevDiv. It was all gvim and build.exe and windbg (the latter vastly more powerful than the VS debugger, even though I think the same team produced both).
For those who haven't used them professionally, Microsoft's developer tools are absolutely fantastic. And not just the editors, debuggers, and code assistance -- the profiling, system monitoring, and large project workflow tools are years ahead of anything that you can get off-Windows. Even if you're willing to pay Real Money to IBM, the only other serious tools vendor left, or pre-merger Sun, which had the best non-Windows profiling support in-system. Coming back to XCode, the GNU stack, and Eclipse after years on the MSFT platform was like taking a flying leap back into 1998.
UX is pretty consistent on both the Apple and Windows platforms. Once you learn a couple of apps, you've basically learned them all. I can't say that for the Linux desktop, where apps still seem to be roughly as consistent as architectural patterns across 3rd party Java frameworks. It's hard to imagine something "better" without moving to a new device factor so that you don't alienate your user base.