Lenn: Well, alternative IDEs can allow plugins (Protean), project management (Protean and Visual Blitz), support for various other things (I know Protean does, dunno about VB), built-in preprocessors (No clue about either since I haven't researched the subject much at all), on-compile scripts (or at various other points- Protean supports this, doubt it if VB does), setting constants on build (e.g., in Protean you can set the constant DEVELOPER=1 for debug mode builds and for anything else it's off- once again, dunno if VB can do this), and other such features that the default IDE (which is the equivalent of Notepad with syntax highlighting) cannot do.
For the most part, plugins and project management are what really sold me on Protean. Being able to adapt my own work to the actual development environment intigued me, so if I wanted to implement my own feature I could.
Either way, it's down to preference, if you don't like the default IDE, you could switch to another free one, one of the commercial ones (Protean, CodeWarrior, Visual Blitz [which, for the price, is really good]), a text editor like vim or nano, etc.
For the most part, plugins and project management are what really sold me on Protean. Being able to adapt my own work to the actual development environment intigued me, so if I wanted to implement my own feature I could.
Either way, it's down to preference, if you don't like the default IDE, you could switch to another free one, one of the commercial ones (Protean, CodeWarrior, Visual Blitz [which, for the price, is really good]), a text editor like vim or nano, etc.