Not only is VS the best IDE ever (and each version keeps getting better, with the new profilers &#x2F; test runners, etc.) but the .NET vm is very powerful, and comes without a lot of the baggage of the JVM.<p>I feel there is a certain distaste of .NET and c# among programmers (especially in the startup world) but I honestly don&#x27;t understand it.<p>I use and love dynamic languages like python, js, ruby... but when it comes to performance + happiness, or low level windows hacking[0], .NET is king.<p>[0] I&#x27;ve recently been using c# for code injection and hooking third party libraries.<p>Some of the performance drawbacks can be avoided by falling back to inline asm via FASM, since native code is easy to call from .NET and the productivity gains from being able to quickly prototype something are huge.