I'm considering checking it out. I write Visual Basic frequently and just <3 the IDE. Anyone with experiences want to throw out some pros or cons? I use mostly LAMP setups currently (with Dreamweaver) but I am aware and am willing to learn something new if its worthwhile.
Hi, Let me give you a nit overview of that then. Visual Basic and Visual Studio for web i.e. C# or ASPX is a totally different thing, specially if you have only used VB 6.0. So never think that web development on Visual Studio is going to be easy for you. Firstly you have to understand Microsoft controls which takes much time if you are a open source developer. Then what I think is that if you are going to develop on Visual Studio then you have learn it thoroughly cause you can't do much of custom programming there like in our PHP or JAVA for say. You obviously can, but then it will take ages to make up your site and will also not incorporate the enhancements of making up a site in ASPX. But the pros is that Ajax controls are very well inbuilt within the .NET framework and can be incorporated seamlessly. So if you need to show up validation errors in a form submission you need to think about those JS scripts as we used to do for PHP. They are inbuilt. And ya, if you are a freelancer or a small company then let me tell you, you have to give much money to Microsoft for the VS developer license and you are seemed to get less projects on .NET, relative to open source technologies. That's a bit overview to quench your thirst lightly. Regards, Acmeous.
I love visual studio!, I develop everything using it. I had to do a bit of JAVA once and needed to use Netbeans, couldn't stand it and couldnt wait to get back to .net. The only con for using it in my opinion is the cost.
If you have to learn any new IDE, and are willing to spend the effort to learn VS, you might as well learn emacs instead. Not only is it thoroughly programmable and works with any language on any platform, it's free, a large user base and under constant development.