Tommy,

I can understand where you're coming from.

I use Visual Studio every day and there's no doubt it is the best IDE in the industry. There's also a part of me that believes all the stuff added to help .NET developers has made it less than perfect for the C/C++ developer. A complaint I had while at Pelco. Now I'm doing C# daily and I appreciate it a bit more.

On the flip side Xcode is pretty sweet and has made huge strides in recent years, mainly due to the huge adoption of iOS by developers outside the norm for Apple. It is quite useful, and I'd put it on par with Visual Studio 6.0, which just so happens to be the best C/C++ IDE I'd ever used.

So they're not so far behind the curve and they're very focused on a specific set of API's and one language, which helps them.

Microsoft delivers choice, Apple delivers simplicity. You can live in both worlds as a developer, and I honestly believe they can be complimentary worlds. Xcode + Cocoa on the desktop and mobile and .NET on the backend.