To me, a great IDE is a IDE that gives me maximum productivity.

These are the keywords to a great IDE:
- Facilitating the developer with anything he needs that -can- be facilitated by software
- Automating or semi-automating anything that -can- be automated and is useful to be automated

Nice examples from VS 2005 are in my opinion:
- Refactoring features
- Code snippets
- Features for integration of application design and code (class diagram view)
- WYSIWYG features that respect the developer's point of view on layout

Kind regards,

David van Leerdam