Tyler posted a link to a blog post about someone preferring a text editor over an integrated development environment (IDE). Naturally, my first thought is, wow, who thinks like this?
My first real exposure to development work was with the old ASP, which was frankly a shitty scripting language. You could use Notepad, FrontPage or a stone tablet to "develop" scripts. And why the heck not? You ran the page and it either worked or it didn't.
In 2001 I got into the .NET beta thing pretty early, along with the new Visual Studio. I think the visual stuff in the app to this day came along to pacify the old VB6 crowd, but I don't know of anyone doing serious development using the visual tools. I've always been one to peck out the markup and C# in text.
And boy, that Intellisense is worth the price of admission. Type "<asp:h" and then tab and you've got yourself a Hyperlink control. Type "i" then tab and you've got ID=". In the C# side of things, "pub-tab-vo-tab" gets you to public void.
Now add in ReSharper, and I'm doing things like Ctrl-F to format code, optimize using statements and namespace references, ditch redundancies (like using "this" in a class when you don't have to), etc. Or highlight some private members, Ctrl-Ins and get public accessors generated for me. Or select and choose extract method, and just like that I have a logical piece of code broken out into its own method with the right parameters.
Visual Studio doesn't get you off the hook for knowing how to design software, but it does free you of the burden of knowing every class name in the framework or dealing with mundane syntax issues. That's empowering and saves time, and best of all, allows you to concentrate on solving actual problems.
To that extent, I think Microsoft has done a pretty terrible job in marketing that ability outside of the core people who already know. When you read a blog post like that one, you can only wonder what they'd think if they saw you working with VS. It's far from perfect, but it makes my life crazy easier.
I guess a major point I left out is, where is the debugger? I've read how you can do some degree of limited debugging with it, but it's all a big hack to make it work. In a good IDE you can step through, into, move backward, look at the stack trace, hover over an object to see its entire state, etc.