The best way to find info on MSDN (google)?
Sorry, I couldn't resist.

I guess you have to weigh individual productivity against other factors like maintainability, industry adoption etc. You might think Haskell, Eiffel or Lisp is _the_ most productive language around, but finding someone to maintain your code after you leave will probably be much harder. Also I guess different developers may be more or less productive in different languages. You may rock at Perl, but other members of your team may eat, breathe and sleep C#. Your team needs to decide on one or the other, so you end up not programming in your "most productive language". I guess .NET improves things a little, in that it is now much easier (altho maybe not advisable) to create solutions with different parts written in different languages.

The best IDE is IntelliJ, visual studio.net is definitely not the best there is, not by far.

Also google groups gives way more information that MSDN does.

Third, a programming language is counter-productive by default: it requires typing, which is cumbersome and error-prone. Generators, fed by model designers are more productive, people should use these more.

You nailed it, Darrell. .Net has a lot going for it and it's getting better every month.

IntelliJ?? Never heard of it. ;) Ok, it may be the best IDE out there. But Java and productivity are two words that do not belong in the same sentence.

I do agree about generators, though. Get them working right and you're really being productive.