Frankly, without an add-in like Resharper, Visual Studio 2005 (even more so Visual Studio 2003) wouldn’t be nearly as usable. In that respect, Eclipse is as usable out of the box as is Visual Studio 2005 + Resharper. But until recently, there was one big difference between the two (and no, I’m not talking about the cost): speed.

Visual Studio 2005, without any add-ins, is fast on my 1.7GHz Pentium-M laptop, where most of the time processor runs at slower speed, down to 600MHz. Eclipse is snappy too. With Resharper (prior to version 2.5) the start-up speed of Visual Studio 2005 is greatly reduced and for some developers, the runtime speed too.

Not any more. Version 2.5 changes the picture dramatically. You really ought to try it out - the startup speed is now just a tad slower (you probably won’t notice) and if you have a relatively modern computer (my laptop is 2.5 years old now and runs it just fine), the runtime speed will never be an issue anyway.