Yes, can you imagine writing code on a white plain board ? Today it was required by me to write C# code on white board using marker :(. It was very tough for me. Lot of syntax errors, wrong methods or properties and on top of all my hand writing. I am glad that they were able to read it.

I started imagining about coding without visual studio. I remember doing HTML  & Java coding using notepad.exe, it was fun isn't it. But now the world has changed lot of new tools to reduce your repetitive task. C'mon you don't want to spend time on remembering all the methods(and their overloads) and properties for String class. Instead of that you can dedicate your thinking towards creating  better design or better code.

Initially it used to be editors, Visual studio is a very good Integrated Development Environment(IDE) , the intellisense feature is an amazing feature, in VS 2008 you have intellisence for ECMA script(Java Script) also. You can always create .NET assemblies without using Visual studio, but can you imagine how much time it is going to take. You need Rapid Development not to take 1 man day to write a code to get some data from database. 

Then you have Application blocks (Enterprise Library) for code reusability. Then you have persistence framework like NHibernate etc for object persistence - for code generation

Now you have software factories for literally creating the entire application :).

See the evolution of coding, from writing code in notepad to generating code using tools(Guidance automation and SW factories), will tools take over my job in future ????? oh my god

Rujith