A sizeable chunk of people on the team are developing Linux because of the build/link speed advantages. Some of us stick it out with Windows because we either like the UI better or because that's where most of our users are right now :-) I use Windows because I like the MSVS IDE the most, but only because for me it's the best of the worst. I really feel like we're pushing the envelope of how large a solution can be developed in it - with hundreds of vcprojs it takes a long time to load and de-jank itself. I wish Microsoft would use it themselves for things like Windows or Office, I would imagine it'd improve a lot if they ate their own dogfood.
> I would imagine [Visual Studio would] improve a lot if they ate their own dogfood.
We do - just not VS :)
I used to work on Microsoft SQL Server. Our build system back then was substantially the same as Windows's. We used the Visual C++ command-line compiler, but we didn't use Visual Studio projects. Instead, our build utility was the BUILD.EXE program in the Windows driver development kit (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ff542351). BUILD is a wrapper for make that defines various useful macros, and enforces certain conventions for makefile contents (for example, the Sources file contains all and (mostly) only the source filenames to be compiled in the current directory). Our build environment wasn't the public DDK, but both have the same origin.
Relatively few people used Visual Studio, mainly because its C++ Intellisense was very slow (it took half an hour one time for the VS debugger to load a just-in-time crash dump). Instead, I used the Source Insight editor (a proprietary third-party product, but site-licensed by Microsoft), and used the WinDBG debugger from the public Debugging Tools for Windows. Source Insight is very fast at code browsing, fast enough for SQL Server's code base - indeed that is its main marketing bullet point. WinDBG isn't particularly fast, but it's no slouch either.
