This is probably my first real blog entry, something of value, that I probably know more about than most people.

First some background:

I've been developing code since 1980 and started using Emacs as an editor early on.  Even in my first position, working in Fortran 77 on DEC Vaxes I was editing with emacs.   Of course at that time there was no such thing as an IDE.  In the mid 1980s I continued to work with Vaxes and added IBM mainframes to the list, still working with Fortran 77 and of course Emacs.  In the mid to late 1980s I moved over to workstation platforms as they became available (Apollo, Sun) and moved to C.  Again, the platforms were new and didn't offer any IDEs.  When I started working with Microsoft products in the early 1990s, writing in C and then C++ IDEs started to show up but were so poor there was no reason anyone would use them.  When Visual C++ finally came out, along with MFC and all the underlying technologies for creating GUIs (dialogs, toolbars, menus, etc) I had already been doing that for several years without an IDE, using Emacs to directly edit the resource files and create what was necessary.  So I continued using Emacs for all creation of the software.  I did use Visual C++, and Visual Studio, but only for project managment and debugging.  In 2000 I moved into a company that was a pure Java shop.  I tried to use NetBeans as an IDE for a while but it was so slow and cumbersome I couldn't complete anything in a reasonable amount of time.  Of course we used ANT to build our projects and NetBeans didn't really offer much for me either.  So Emacs it was again, for six more years.  Even as Eclipse came out and gained a foothold I refused to switch.  Saying things like I remember more about the classes I'm using if I'm forced to look them up in the javadocs and type the full name all the time.  At one point (before Eclipse) I even worked out how to use Emacs as a debugger for Java (J2EE based code).  Now while I was doing all this Java based coding I did manage to keep up with some of my Microsoft based projects.  However, I didn't implement anything new and therefore I never jumped to .NET.  Well that day is here.

Current Situation:

After six years of not learning anything new in the Microsoft world and .NET having come into the picture and being in production on its 3rd revision I'm back and trying to learn and implement .NET projects (ASP.NET, Windows Forms, C#).  Of course I have Visual Studio and MSDN (kept my subscriptions active all these years) to help me and I also have trusty Emacs by my side to allow me to edit with the keystrokes and control keys I am used to. 

Status:

Well it isn't working out so well this time around.  .NET simply has too many pieces and parts to keep track of.  Too many separate files (*.cs, *.Designer.cs, *.resx).  Also the new GUI (windows forms) editing is considerably better than it used to be, drop a control onto a form and it helps position it correctly (horizontal and vertical alignment).  All the properties are displayed and easily changable.  Of course I could edit the .resx files directly, they are after all just XML files.  But there are a lot of new properties and Visual Studio makes it pretty easy to change them directly.  The refactoring in VS also is very nice, change it in the IDE and it renames the files, changes references, etc.  (yeah I know, Eclipse does that with Java).  And a real nice addition (I saw this documented years ago but never tried it) is the emacs style for the Visual Studio editor.  Ok, it is lame Emacs, very slow (can't keep up with my control keys), but at least allows me to transition without a complete brain re-training period.  Now of course you need multiple monitors to really do this effectively and I'm struggling since my 2nd monitor died a week ago.  But I haven't switched back to Emacs yet.

Conclusion:

Emacs has played a big part of my life, it has been my editing pal for something like 25 years.  I will never completely give it up (editing binary data is still sometimes necessary) but for now I won't be using it as my primary editor while working on .NET projects.