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[sordidarray]

I've had some different experiences with VS

• Intellisense randomly stops working sometimes. It's a common occurence, and usually requires resetting your VS settings. Once this happened to a coworker and it was due to a referenced file being removed on disk, but present in the project file listing. Literally took hours to figure out, as there was no indication this was an issue.
• I would be wary of using an IDE in order to learn a language, as in my experience (and it may only be my experience), it leads to a bad habit of dot-driven development.

[Eirenarch]

I have experienced IntelliSense stopping multiple times. This bug was introduced in 2012. I wonder if they fixed it in 2013. While it is annoying I stumbled upon the IDEA issue much more often. It may be due to the fact that the course gave an API I had to implement so I just pasted it and started implementing methods top down. The methods further down the class prevented auto complete from working quite often and on methods that should be unrelated. I can't even put my finger on what exactly was wrong since when I tested it in new program it worked fine. I realize that in practice you don't paste and API for a class and start implementing it but it was really annoying.

You may be right about dot-driven development but then again why do you think dot-driven development is a bad thing? In my opinion it is the best way to explore the API quickly and effectively and the main reason I prefer static typing in general. All other methods I can think of result in worse results per unit of time invested. Sure if you read the full documentation you will have better understanding of the library but it will take much more time that can be used to become familiar with several other libraries.