I really like Visual Studio. It makes my job so much easier than a simple text editor (which is pretty much what VFP's editor is). Once the Roslyn compiler for .Net is released, I see VS getting even better.


>I'm quite happy with the set of tools I use (VFP+Thor, SQL, Vault for source control, Toad for SQL and FogBugz for, well, bug tracking and internal wiki), and I'm even happier that some other tools are not mine to use (CRM, project management, ...). Over the years, however, I've seen a bunch of tools which were supposed to help with this or that, which were abandoned because most of the people didn't use them. Didn't have the time to learn, nor the inclination.
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>One thing that specially sucks in almost every setup I've seen it is the writing of help. M$ has wasted at least three ways of doing it - remember two versions of .hlp and .chm stuff and how to get them written using Word? Nightmare, all of them. The GPL OpenDoc way of doing it is much easier. I'd even prefer a bunch of .html files (that .chm internally is, anyway), actually, the best would be web pages stored in the good old help.dbf - which was simple and worked great. Instead, I remember having to waste a pretty much unpaid week updating stuff around a chm file - not so much about content, content was easy, it was all those special tags etc.
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>Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. I somehow stay alert whenever Microsoft promises something to make programmers' lives more productive.