🙂

VS2010 and VS2012 are bad..
VS2013 is much better already, VS2015 looks like a finished product (e.g. Nuget is much more useable in VS2015), still has some rough edges in new features though.

Same goes for resharper: v9 is quite polished, wouldn’t recommend anything below that. Turn off css parsing if it gets too annoying. Turn on solution wide analysis if you want it to be more like IDEA.

Overall performance – make sure you have an SSD and 16gb ram.

Regarding remote debugging – .NET does support it if you install a debugging service on the target machine. If that sounds like too much – have you tried debugging a memory dump? VS2015 has excellent support for memory dump debugging (save dump from task manager, open file in VS).

NCrunch is really awesome, can cause some problems on large projects though – will require tweaking.

Ninject – is a disaster IMO (e.g. google performance comparison of .NET DI frameworks): everyone uses it because everyone uses it. Try to pick something else.

Hibernate – you can always use NHibernate if you want to be comfortable with transaction management. EF is different and that is often forgotten. Use Dapper if in need of a short learning curve.

dotPeek – I somehow doubt there is a comparable tool in Java (IDEA included) – take decompiled sources debugging for an instance
Going a bit deeper into reflection: Mono.Cecil is the best
Even deeper: search youtube for “LayerOne 2012 – Jon McCoy – Hacking .NET”

Regarding concurrency support – there are some 3rd party libraries that would help with primitives (e.g. AsyncEx).

Now there are things now like async/await, .NET Core 1 – in my opinion still a bit raw and tooling is no yet there (try profiling async heavy code). Quite fun though.

In terms of future for .NET at this point I’d say it looks good, I am quite optimistic about both .NET Core development and Xamarin purchase.

E.g. I can use Less and Scss in .net without installing Ruby/Compass. I can do automatic JS/CSS minifications to, with System Web Optimization. Then there is MVC 5 and WebApi 2, and Razor Templates, and oh SSDT Projects (Sql Server Data Tools), and things like PetaPoco (Micro ORM), and tons and tons of video codec libraries “e.g. I can grab a thumbnail from a video at a specific timeframe with 1 line of code”.

I build cool things all the time, and I do it on .Net. Even cross platform (run everywhere) games, e.g. MonoGame/XNA Studio, or even c# in Unity%…

And now that .Net Core 5 is out, I would expect to be seeing a lot more of .Net, and on every platform.

Also, I dislike using Java for most of the reasons you dislike using .Net, so I guess its to each there own, personal preference based on Experiences.

I’ll also check out nCrunch. Since writing this post, on almost every project I’ve been on since then, I’ve used IntelliJ. I still miss the automatic incremental compile of Eclipse (for Java development), but I’m slowly getting use to save/build keyboard combinations. On most other fronts, IntelliJ now soundly beats Eclipse.

The one area I still did prefer Visual Studio was for Windows C++ development. So, I’m looking forward to evaluating JetBrain’s new CLion when it becomes available.

Re: Having to save and build, I recommend nCrunch. I almost never build anymore since nCrunch is constantly building *AND* running my tests in the background and giving me almost instant feedback. I have yet to find a comparable tool for IntelliJ IDEA (not sure about Eclipse).