I have to admit that I like Visual Studio. Well, ok, I like Visual Studio 2008. The newest version (2010) sucks!
For some reason, Microsoft thought it was a great idea to re-write the entire back-end. As such, they dropped things with “low popularity” for “higher priorities.”
How rediculous!
What, exactly, am I so angry about? Emacs key-binding support. It’s gone! Microsoft, if you don’t have the time to invest to make a product at least as good as your last version, don’t re-write it. My team works almost exclusively with Visual Studio 2008 (which I rather like) but we will not be upgrading to 2010. Why? Because I’m stubborn. I’ve been a developer for a long time now, and I like emacs. Simple, yes?
According to Microsoft, emacs key-bindings were less of a priority than pretty gradients and a new icon style (don’t even get me started on the lack of a standardized backwards comparability format).
I say to you Microsoft, that if you want the several hundred thousand dollars that my department is willing to spend on a newer version of Visual Studio, you’d better pay a developer some cash to do something your products have done in the past. Until then, we’ll keep our money.
UPDATE
Check out Ray’s comment below for an extension.
[...] Studio, which received a very helpful response. The newest version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 didn’t ship with emacs support. This was later remedied by Microsoft with an emulator. [...]
Your post was a tad few days early. Just released: Emacs Emulation extension for VS 2010. https://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2010/09/01/emacs-emulation-extension-now-available.aspx