My experience has been the exact opposite: Java IDEs are bulky and hard to navigate while VS is at least bulky and easy to navigate. :-)

I haven't had any issues with clunky Java IDEs since my 256mb ram IBM laptop died.

Visual studio on the other hand lacks so many of the things that made it nice to develop in Java, such as automatic implementation of interfaces, inplace renaming, the ability to move a variable from being inside a method to becoming a field at the click of a few buttons.

That said, C# is light years ahead of Java - too bad that the ide isn't.

I haven't tried VS 2010, but in previous releases there was no "Go to class..." type functionality! How is that easy to navigate? Thank god for JetBrains ReSharper plugin.

All the major Java IDEs have had "Go to class..." for a long time.

2008 and 2010 both have it, as well as a lot of other easy ways to navigate,

I searched for a very long time when I last used 2008. How do you do it?

I might have been wrong about 2008, don't have it installed anymore.

It's there in 2010 (CTRL-,).

But, not in the express editions.

Oh yeah, definitely. As an example, just look at the intuitive icons they picked: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y47ychfe(VS.80).aspx

That's so easy to understand I definitely didn't even need to read the docs...

Okay, how would you design icons for abstract concepts like struct and interface? About half those icons actually make a lot of sense to me (the other half are just arbitrary symbols, as far as I can tell).

You pick those up in context pretty quickly. If you know a class has a method "DoSomething" and you see the pink block icon next to "DoSomething" and "DoSomethingElse", then you learn pretty quickly that "DoSomethingElse" must be another method.

That's odd, I've never used an IDE of any kind* but all I hear from friends that have used C#/.NET is how great Visual Studio is.

* (well, Emacs counts, but not to people who normally use the word IDE in my experience)

The problem is that the overwhelming majority of C#/.NET developers ONLY have used Visual Studio. Monodevelop is not quite up to par, so really, for C#, there's only one choice for an IDE outside of notepad... I used to do more java development, but now do more C#, and I miss the the polish of Eclipse over VS (Incremental Java compiler is a huge win, Refactoring (resharper freeze my machine), Search indexes, Auto completion is still better, code navigation via back button, much better Source control integrations...)

I've used VS2005 and VS2008 extensively, and always enjoyed working with them, especially VS2008. I haven't used VS2010 much (read: at all) but am looking forward to using it.

VS2010 is IMO a far superior IDE to VS2008. Especially if you're doing WPF or Silverlight. The browser, project system, and designer is just way faster. Which is pretty surprising because the Beta for VS2010 was horribly slow.

My main ask is to get Xaml in better shape. I know that the dynamic language crowd will love Xaml, because 99% of all errors are runtime exceptions, but that's just a freaking drag on my productivity - especially since I think they can do static analysis to statically find probably 75% of the issues at compile time.

I haven't really used any of the Java IDEs out there, but I thought I'd mention that you probably mean VS2008 ;)

As for Visual Studio, its extensibility model might not be "awesome", but that is definitely changed for the better in VS2010, and for the "rest of us", jetbrains has some pretty decent products.