Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs
What is that statement based on? It is an absurd idea. If "more polished" means better code then this statement is just not true.
I just completed an internship in a big technology company and the code produced there (for automation/control in the energy and utilities sector) is quite certainly "more polished" than any iPhone application or whatever else people develop in Xcode (certainly not automation/control applications). And they use, amongst other more specialized tools, Virtual Studio.
Xcode is an IDE with a very small user-base, alone because of the fact that the Mac still has a small user-base within the industry. It probably even still has a small user-base in the developer community (aside from the hipster apps world).
I would love to see some evidence that apps developed in Xcode are usually "more polished" than apps produced in Visual Studio.
And in my personal opinion Visual Studio, especially IntelliSense kicks Xcode's butt every day. And same with MS Office...
Note: I don't use an IDE unless developing in C/C++, C#, Java or Objective-C
I never understand people who think that VS is the greatest IDE. Sure, when I first started using VS2003 having been doing all of my C coding on the command line prior to that point it felt revolutionary and the best thing since sliced bread. Having used every iteration since then for my day job programming C# applications, I actually cannot stand VS. My dev machine is a dual core 3GHz processor with 4GB of RAM. Yet, compiling a reasonably sized project takes an age.
Frequent recompilations which are unnecessary as no code has changed. I can't make a code change while the application is being debugged. The sliding panels really get on my nerves, it's slow to open projects and to close projects. It's difficult to get fine grained control over the build process within the IDE itself. Every single "visual" feature, such as ASPX designer is dog slow to switch into from code view, or back out of. This has been the case with every version of VS and every dev PC I've had for the last four years.
However there are some things which I like about it - it has a good plugin API (Resharper is awesome) and a nice integrated debugger. My biggest issue is that it is a resource hog and incredibly slow.
I've also coded in Xcode and before that Project Builder for even longer than I've been using VS. The lack of published plugin support is annoying in Xcode but that is probably my biggest gripe. I make no comments about the level of "polish" that an IDE allows a user to provide as I don't think the IDE makes a difference. I would however say that I find myself probably twice as productive coding in XCode than I am in VS.
I don't know much about the WYSIWYG parts of VS, I only write textual code.
If your machine is too slow, get more RAM and an SSD. It's your daily tool, it's worth the investment.
"I don't think the IDE makes a difference" - Huh? Then why are we having this discussion =)
I myself spend the vast majority of my time in XCode [writing a database], using VS only to maintain the Windows port and C# client libraries. I find that I'm roughly equally productive in both, but if I had a choice I'd take VS over XCode.
Yes your'e right that the compiler != the IDE. The compile time should be attributed to the compiler, of course, but VS has a habit of invoking the compiler unnecessarily, even if no source has changed.
I don't really use the WYSIWIG aspects either but all aspects of the UI seem slow and cluttered in my experience. And whether or not you and I use those aspects of the IDE is somewhat immaterial. It is called Visual Studio after all and touts the visual designers.
My point regarding the specs of my dev machine were that it is a fairly decent, new machine and the load being placed on it really isn't that high. Comparatively I run XCode on a 4 year old laptop with 2GB RAM, slower disk, slower processor and it is far more responsive. (And FWIW the compiler is faster too, especially now they are using LLVM).
When I say the IDE doesn't make a difference to the level of polish you can apply to an application what I'm trying to say is that if you're writing mostly textual code as I do too, then the IDE doesn't really factor into the polish of the application. Although, I suppose I'm contradicting myself as if I'm more productive in XCode then I have more time available to polish, so there is an indirect relationship there :P
At the end of the day, they're both decent tools and and everyone will have their preference. My comment was really just because a lot of people have started using XCode in recent years, having moved from VS due to the "iPhone effect" and I see an awful lot of comments and posts about how much better VS is, and my experience contradicts that :)
I just completed an internship in a big technology company and the code produced there (for automation/control in the energy and utilities sector) is quite certainly "more polished" than any iPhone application or whatever else people develop in Xcode (certainly not automation/control applications). And they use, amongst other more specialized tools, Virtual Studio.
Xcode is an IDE with a very small user-base, alone because of the fact that the Mac still has a small user-base within the industry. It probably even still has a small user-base in the developer community (aside from the hipster apps world).
I would love to see some evidence that apps developed in Xcode are usually "more polished" than apps produced in Visual Studio.
And in my personal opinion Visual Studio, especially IntelliSense kicks Xcode's butt every day. And same with MS Office...
Note: I don't use an IDE unless developing in C/C++, C#, Java or Objective-C