Last week I had the mispleasure of using Visual Studio .net (Enterprise Edition, yo) for a few days. While using this wonderful product, somehow I got lost and forgot it was 2003. Can anyone explain to me how in 2003 anyone can sell a big league IDE that :

• Doesn't highlight my brackets or parens. I mean, holy shit, this is so basic. Even the basic editor that ships with the KDE desktop can do this if it detects that you're working with code. I don't expect Notepad to do that, but I do expect something that calls itself an "Enterprise Edition" IDE to do that.
  
• Constantly second guesses me. I hate doing HTML. I don't go there much these days, and when I do go there, I hate any editor/IDE that automagically puts in closing tag as soon as I type up an opening tag. Here's a hint, MSFT folks, generally I'm going to want to put something between tags. Don't just shove the ending tag in there as soon as I close the opening tag. Download jedit and look at how they do it, what with their intellisense when you type that / on a closing bracket and their nonsense about keeping track of what's open. Just like Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me, nobody does it better.
  
• Screw up my projects. Admittedly this happened a few months ago, not last week, but still. If I need to open a little C++ project from sourcesafe, and the version in sourcesafe isn't the latest, you may convert it for me. You may NOT convert the version on sourcesafe making it so I'm the only one who can open it.
  
• Looks like crap. Come on, let's face it. It is 2003. VS.net EE still looks like something that was thrown together in 3 weeks when it's compared to the elegance of JBuilder (and anyone who's used jbuilder knows how badly I'm stretching it there) or Kylix/Delphi (and anyone who's used Kylix or Delphi is nodding knowingly).

That is all. Please have someone at Microsoft email me when all of these issues are fixed. We'll have migrated entirely over to java long before then, but it'll be nice to know they're on the case.