I love VS. But I could only understand that reaction coming from Eclipse. IntelliJ is a worthy rival of VS and even surpasses it in a few areas.
I'll admit, I like IntelliJ a LOT more than Eclipse, but it still comes second to Visual Studio. This is largely due to the simple fact that VS is what I've used the most, with Qt being a reasonably close second, so I know its ins-and-outs quite well. Though, another part of it is that there are certain aspects of it that make development, for me, a hell of a lot less of a hassle and much more intuitive. I'll give ya an example: adding a reference to a compiled library. In VS, you right-click the project in the Solution Explorer, hit "Add Reference..." and you're done. Bam, now all you gotta do is add using statements where they need to be and you're golden. In Eclipse, I
still haven't managed to figure that one out, I didn't fare much better with IntelliJ. I shouldn't have to box with my IDE just to reference a library, I don't care
what bloody language you're using. Part of that might be Java's fault, with it not compiling class libraries into, ya know,
actual effing class library files, but that still doesn't excuse certain IDEs from being as painfully bass-ackwards as possible when it comes to functionality that should be a simple process.