I know a professional developer or three who write low level and high level code on multiple platforms and use vim and gdb fluently and who prefers Visual Studio for coding on Windows. If you do the kinds of development that it is designed for, especially the dotnet managed stuff, it is a really good development environment.
But for doing lower-level native Win32 code, the kind of thing Microsoft seems to be wishing would just go away, I prefer a command line compiler. Linux and Mac are generally much better for that kind of development.
I disagree. For a few hundred/thousand line projects it's ok.
I deal with large (1Mloc+) 10 year+ old codebases in C#/ASP.Net and it is in no way capable of handling a large project without chopping it into miniscule assemblies and having solutions for each.
The IDE is monolithic enough to have severe usability and performance problems. It doesn't scale well and therefore is a risk if you want to continue using the platform for many years.
It's true. I have to split off separate .slns when the code gets to be large like that. I would not try to handle 1M lines in a .sln. UI responsiveness took a huge hit after VC6 with the dotnet stuff and never really recovered.
But for doing lower-level native Win32 code, the kind of thing Microsoft seems to be wishing would just go away, I prefer a command line compiler. Linux and Mac are generally much better for that kind of development.