It's long past time since Visual Studio was the only game in town. Back when it was between VS6 and Borland C++ Builder, I was initially attracted by Builder's drag-and-drop UI construction - it seemed very odd at the time that "Visual" studio didn't offer that functionality. But Borland's descent into bug-ridden stagnation and my discovery of wxWidgets pushed me into the VC++ world for upwards of a decade.
But now with Eclipse reaching maturity (it's the main IDE at the banking multinational where I recently worked), I'm finding less and less justification to stick with Visual Studio when my MSDN subscription expires. Another very promising tool is Qt Creator: http://qt.nokia.com/products/developer-tools
This has less of the UI quirkiness of Eclipse, and the built-in documentation is great. Qt is now using Clang for code validation, but can be set to use Gcc or the Microsoft compiler. So given that I'm using Qt anyway for cross-platform UI, this may be the way forward.
But now with Eclipse reaching maturity (it's the main IDE at the banking multinational where I recently worked), I'm finding less and less justification to stick with Visual Studio when my MSDN subscription expires. Another very promising tool is Qt Creator: http://qt.nokia.com/products/developer-tools
This has less of the UI quirkiness of Eclipse, and the built-in documentation is great. Qt is now using Clang for code validation, but can be set to use Gcc or the Microsoft compiler. So given that I'm using Qt anyway for cross-platform UI, this may be the way forward.