What are the features of Resharper that make you say VS isn't complete without it?
Next big thing is navigation. Go to type, go to symbol and go to file are super quick and means I never go to the source tree to navigate the solution.
Symbol search is incredibly useful, that was a revelation when somebody told me about it. But Visual Studio has had that since at least 2010, I think maybe 2008. Resharper's is a bit more complete, but I think the VS built-in one is a bit faster. The VS native implementation is Edit -> Navigate To, the default key combo is ctrl-comma, but I think Resharper takes that combo for its own purposes.
I think it's because I find the VS interface incredibly cluttered anyway, and Resharper just makes it worse. The right click menus are already 10 miles long filled with useless clutter and when it starts mucking around with the already edging towards overwhelming intellisense pop-ups it just annoyed me one too many time.
After 2 weeks of trialling it then only thing I was really using was the "go to implementation..." but I've long since given up on the ridiculousness of making everything mockable anyway so it's only occasionally useful.
The worst thing about VS is how slow it can be sometimes, even on incredibly powerful machines. In the end it's a glorified text editor and everything should be secondary to that.
There's nothing more annoying than pressing ctrl-f (find) and then have it pause for 1/2 a second because it's trying to parse a massive html tree for intellisense you don't even need because you're just trying to delete a single node you know the name of.
The text editor is only a tiny part of an IDE, the bits that are added are quite important. Integrated debugging (with edit+continue while debugging), integrated version control interface, integrated build system, integrated profiler and much more makes it so much more productive than having to e.g. do debugging with recompile/restart turnaround times.
That's the main reason to use an IDE, in my mind, along with the ability to display the call sites of a function.
> integrated version control interface,
Never noticed any advantage compared to a shell with git or git-svn, personally.
> integrated build system
Depends what you mean by that. What's precious is the ability to detect errors before doing a build or testing anything. "Integrated build systems" in general I find often fall flat on their face when something outside of the IDE touches the files.
It's also the thing that's most important to flow, to producing, not navigating or testing.
That it can pause and stutter when you're just trying to do a simple edit is pretty silly.
I love VS and it's one of the things I always miss whenever using something else, but there's a lot of annoyances and a lot of sub-par features and some you should never use features.
I notice you said "integrated version control interface", if you're talking about TFS, it's terrible. Stop using it. The interface is terrible, all generic tables that you can't tell apart. It's a massive effort to see file changes. And worse than all of that, the actual version control system is shockingly bad, even compared to SVN, let alone Git. You're a madman to be using TFS, it's so bad.
I haven't lived with it long enough to find out if it's as easy to break as Eclipse when you install the wrong combination of plugins, though. Oddly enough, its vim emulator plugin is much better than what I found for Eclipse, which I find quite ironic.
One problem I'm running into at the moment is I'm trying to port a vendor's reference SOAP Service over to Mono/Linux and their provided secret sauce DLL is blowing up when calling their objects' constructors. I'm yet to pin it on Linux or Mono. Here's hoping the vendor is Mono friendly and willing to debug it. If not we're going to have one oddball Windows server in a sea of Ubuntu EC2 instances.
Ironically, we have some large-ish C# code-bases that run on everything but Windows.
The memory model is, IMHO, where Microsoft is pushing the limits of the existing C# language.
What has Microsoft changed in the .NET memory model that makes you think they're pushing the limits?
From what I can tell, the .NET memory model is one of the things that has changed the least. The languages have changed a lot faster than the memory model.