Whilst IDEs do allow developers who have no more than a basic understanding of what they are doing to reach their end goal, very few developers fall into that category (in my experience at least) It is also true, however, that one can be an efficient developer without reliance on an IDE. Considering the original post described the fact that they are using build sripts, unit testing and some form of debugger the variable here is physically writing the code. VS (as the IDE in question) provides the following (off the top of my head) to facilitate the code writing - intellisense - snippets - shortcuts such as 'find references' and 'goto definition' - refactoring Intellisense: without an IDE providing intellisense (and if your text editor provides this it is arguably an IDE) there is a requirement for the developer to know the entire class library with which they are working or to have a reference, such as MSDN, available (and to be able to search it as efficiently) ... if you can do this, bravo sir! Snippets: Easily replicated with copy and paste from a file of useful code snippets Shortcuts: Most text editors these days are good at text searching, however they wont have awareness of symbols or scope Refactoring: Same as with shortcuts, text replacement is normally pretty good in text editors (and macros can enhance it) but you still lack the scoping and contextual awareness I would say this is down to developer preference. If you are familiar with a text editor and have a good memory of the class libraries you may well be more efficient using that approach than struggling with VS forcing you to do things the microsoft way. I, myself, cut my teeth in visual studio (im choosing to forget my brief forray into delphi) and would struggle without an IDE, not because I lack skill as a developer (at least i hope) but because everything i type would come out as the first 2 letters followed by a space :D
