the corner office

I installed and started mucking around with Visual Studio 2005 today, since I'm going to be doing a bit of C++ work soon (wahooey, it's been far too long). My word. Over 2 gigs just to install the platform. Installing the MSDN library is another 2 gigs. How on earth does MS stay on top of this much software?

It's not a fair comparison, because I know the one IDE better than the other, and the languages are different, &c, &c, but my initial impression is that Visual Studio is just a bit rudimentary in comparison to Eclipse. I like Eclipse's drill-down navigation and browsing model, and I couldn't find any way to do some of the same things with VS. VS's navigation functionality isn't bad, but it just seems... lacking.

The main place where Eclipse appeared miles ahead to me though, is in its refactoring support. If Visual Studio has any refactoring support for C++, it certainly didn't jump up and shout 'hey, use me!' As a simple example, I wanted to fix a spelling mistake in a method name in some code I've inherited, and it seems the only way to do this will be an old-skool Ctrl-H Find and Replace, with the usual schlep and risk that entails. In Eclipse, those sorts of Alt-Shift-R jobs become almost sub-conscious. You don't notice how valuable those features are until you can't use them.

Of course, when I finally do sit down and RTF-Visual-Studio-M I'm sure I'll find that a lot of these things are doable, in some guise or another.