Oh I remember CV quite well lol. I was developing with a bastardized combination of Microsoft C++ and Borland C++ way-back-then, where the front end was Borland C++ and the calculations were done in Microsoft C .DLLs. If I wanted to debug the calculations I used CV, if I wanted to debug the front-end, I used Turbo Debugger.

With regards to development tools, Microsoft often did very odd things that I never understood. With the exception of QuickBasic, they've never done IDEs very well- up to and including the present, they were always big, slow, and prodding. Remember when they switched from .hlp files to .chm files? .hlp files loaded fast and could be searched quickly and were very valuable when used with other editors. .CHM files? Big, slow-to-load, and cumbersome.

Now in fairness to Microsoft, one thing I give them credit for was the full indexing of your source tree to quickly navigate symbols with a click or the ability to walk call-trees in code. I also acknowledge that all of that indexing and referencing takes time, speed, and memory, all of which contribute to the "big, slow, and cumbersome" feel. But I've been programming with threads since OS/2 1.0, and there are ways of doing some of that in a way that is not so impactful to the UI, unless of course you happen to be forcing your development team to channel everything through single-threaded COM apartments.

Visual Studio in general needs to be re-written from the ground up with speed and responsiveness in mind.