Windows Performance Explorer is an example of something public. It’s like dtrace on steroids. Page Heap is really helpful for finding buffer overflows. I’ve nev

Windows Performance Explorer is an example of something public. It’s like dtrace on steroids. Page Heap is really helpful for finding buffer overflows. I’ve never used a debugger with a better UI than the VS one. WinDbg’s reverse debugging is super powerful and fast enough to be useable. Not public: the best instrumented profiler I’ve ever used. Smaller things like Assert tags so you can uniquely ID them. A massive distributed test system (love hate with that one). Profiling and optimization tools to answer pretty much any question about how your product behaves. I always thought MSVC’s dialect of C++ was a little more programmer friendly. E.g. you can construct an object inline and pass it by reference. The compiler doesn’t do ridiculous things once it finds out you sign overflowed - it’s designed to support applications not meet synthetic benchmarks. PDBs make a lot more sense to me than packing debug info directly in the binary.