Microsoft didn't like it when someone made a plugin for Visual Studio express, yet are now opening up the IDE for everyone use?

I don't think so!

What MS _don't_ seem to be offering is a cross-platform IDE for a full range of languages with a good choice of developer tools from a wide range of vendors.

How do I work with Java (MyEclipse) or my Oxygen XML editor, for example?

Where's the Ruby integration? How about Google Web Tools?

I'll need a _lot_ more than this to make me switch from Eclipse!

Maybe if eclipse wasn't such an unstable pita or if scite were actively developed I would give you this one but they aren't I don't give a damn about visual studio but I doubt it's feeling that much pressure from the people that use it.

I agree about Eclipse - it's not stable enough. VS is reasonably solid (although not as rock solid as VS6 was).

Someone asked "Where's the Ruby integration?"

We already do Ruby (and Rails) integration into Visual Studio. It's called Ruby In Steel - you can find it here http://www.sapphiresteel.com.

I don't want to get into IDE wars here. Suffice to say I would invite you to compare the quality of our IntelliSense and the speed of our debugger with any other Ruby IDE Eclipse-based or otherwise.

We have long wanted to offer a low-cost 'all in one' edition of Ruby In Steel for those poeple who don't have Visual Studio as it is the price, not the quality, which is the main barrier to non-VS users. Suffice to say we are extermely interested in the VS Shell.