I keep hearing how wonderful Visual Studio .NET is, and how it kicks the ass of any Java IDE. Unfortunately, I mostly hear this from people who haven't used a Java IDE in the last three years, and I haven't used Visual Studio in about... er... five. So I just grit my teeth and say "Yes, whatever you say".

As such, it's nice to hear from a generally level-headed source like Martin Fowler that JetBrains' .NET IDE will be a welcome improvement.

I know lots of ThoughtWorkers who are dying for this tool. While Visual Studio has a lot of nice features, the programming capabilities seem primitive when you've used a tool like IntelliJ or Eclipse. Of course, I find I really miss the refactoring capabilities, but there's much more than just the refactoring that makes IntelliJ such a stunning tool. Having a tool like this as a plug in to Visual Studio will make .NET programming much better.

So, like, nyeah!