That's an interesting take. You do have to have tools that adapt to your personal style, and it sounds like you felt that you needed to push yourself into different habits, which is commendable.
I've found that many programmers who come from a Java background over to .NET have a bad habit of writing their code and deploying it without debugging it even once. It's so much trouble to debug for them, they just wait until it blows up and takes down the server. Or their error handling is just throwing a stack trace to a screen instead of actually handling the error.
Heh, yeah, that approach sounds pretty terrible to deal with. What I do is extensive unit tests and useful logging. Unit tests catch most of the stupid stuff and plenty of the sophisticated stuff (and are a useful thing to have for a lot of other reasons anyway). Logging lets me track down what slips through the cracks. Most of the bugs that resulted in serous production issues for me were a result of rather complex interactions between complex components, not something a debugger would have helped anyone with.
That said, I have no doubt that there are a plenty of people who are amazing at writing code in VS and are much better developers than I am.
I've found that many programmers who come from a Java background over to .NET have a bad habit of writing their code and deploying it without debugging it even once. It's so much trouble to debug for them, they just wait until it blows up and takes down the server. Or their error handling is just throwing a stack trace to a screen instead of actually handling the error.
Bad programming finds a way.