Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

Being a Windows programmer by trade, I've been using Visual Studio .NET 2003 for quite some time. I don't really like it. I don't like how it tries to outsmart me. I'd rather use Emacs. The trouble is, unless I want to be a complete masochist, there are certain types of projects that almost require the use of this bloatfest. For example, if you want to write an XML Webservice in C#, you could do it using any old text editor. It'd take you about 10 times as long as if you'd used VS, but it can be done. If you asked me to do it right now, I don't know that I could finish it by this time next week. Visual Studio is very forgiving, but only of the programmers lack of knowledge of the language and framework (and any APIs) that he's using.

And then there's Intellisense. Now, I don't think Intellisense is a bad idea on it's own, but when a programmer depends on it (and just about all of the ones I work with do), you've got another situation where, if Visual Studio doesn't work, they can't either. Can't recall the method to generate XML from a DataSet? No problem, just type "myDataSet." and Visual Studio will give you all the methods, properties and (if applicable) events associated with that object. All you have to do is find the one that looks like it'll do the trick and try it. If your project won't build, you know you've chosen the wrong method. Hooray for encouraging programmer laziness (the bad kind).

This article explains (at length) pretty much exactly how I feel about this code-generating behemoth. Warning: Techie Jargon-a-go-go.