I had a meeting with a client today in which we were discussing an upcoming project that is based on the .NET Compact Framework. After an hour or so of discussion, I walked him through a couple of features in they Visual Studio.NET IDE– we basically built a simple PocketPC application and tested it on an (emulated) device inside of 15 minutes. This is really where .NET shines above every other tool I’ve seen: the IDE. Whether the framework is better than J2EE is debatable. Whether the lanuge (C#) is better than Java is debatable… but there is simply no question in my mind that the VS.NET IDE is the best development environment ever created. It alone justifies moving to .NET.
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