I used to work for MS in 2007. I used VS.NET for a while in 2010 (for couple months, mostly writing code and unit-tests via NUnit) and in 2012 doing mostly Sharepoint so I may be outdated.
Back in 2008-2010, I used Eclipse exclusively with Maven (and m2clipse), FindBugs, Checkstyle, PMD, Hudson (Jenkins nowadays), Spring, GWT, with some exposure to HBase and Hadoop. I never had to wrestle with any licensing issues at all. If I want to use something I would go to the internet and download them (IDE, plugins, tools, libraries or whatnot). They're also high-quality grade tools and not toys or something with serious limitation that forces you to buy the commercial offerings.
Feel free to invalidate my opinions. Love to see a better version of NuGET. Love to see VS.NET Express to support plugins. Love to see what great cool plugins exist for VS.NET. Love to see any heavy-weight framework/libraries from .NET that are being used in large-scale and in may areas. It wouldn't hurt if you can list them here for the benefit of everybody else as well.
PS: Mylyn is a very underrated tool. I heard they're going to port Mylyn to VS.NET but haven't seen it from their product page yet as of today.
Back in 2008-2010, I used Eclipse exclusively with Maven (and m2clipse), FindBugs, Checkstyle, PMD, Hudson (Jenkins nowadays), Spring, GWT, with some exposure to HBase and Hadoop. I never had to wrestle with any licensing issues at all. If I want to use something I would go to the internet and download them (IDE, plugins, tools, libraries or whatnot). They're also high-quality grade tools and not toys or something with serious limitation that forces you to buy the commercial offerings.
Feel free to invalidate my opinions. Love to see a better version of NuGET. Love to see VS.NET Express to support plugins. Love to see what great cool plugins exist for VS.NET. Love to see any heavy-weight framework/libraries from .NET that are being used in large-scale and in may areas. It wouldn't hurt if you can list them here for the benefit of everybody else as well.
PS: Mylyn is a very underrated tool. I heard they're going to port Mylyn to VS.NET but haven't seen it from their product page yet as of today.