Why use Visual Studio in SharePoint?

If you can do things using SharePoint designer or by using browser then why should we use Visual studio?

Also you can check out some posts on:

- Deploy custom images to SharePoint 2010

- Hide ribbon in sharepoint 2010

- Content databases are growing too large in SharePoint 2013

By using Visual studio you can do very powerful things like:
You can use different built in templates available in Visual Studio 2010 to develop SharePoint things like visual web part, site definition, content types etc. Visual Studio 2010 has more templates that Visual Studio 2008.

Also it has F5 feature to build, deploy and debug like normal asp.net application.

- You can edit and debug things in your development machine which is not possible using SharePoint designer.

- You can write code using C#.net or VB.Net.

- Visual studio creates the wsp packages which are easy to deploy and also can be reused. Also you can use it in different server farm etc.

- Also you can put everything in the source control like VSS or SVN and can check-in and check-out and do work simultaneously.

- You also can have a build server if you have a very big project.

- Also one more major thing you can do: you can do code analysis, which you can not do in SharePoint designer.

- Also by using Visual Studio 2010 you can develop Sandboxed solution. Which allowed us to deploy code, even allows to upload the wsp to the solution store of the current web site without affecting other site collection on you SharePoint site.

- This is very much helpful in hosted environments.

- Visual Studio also provides Mapped Folder concept, so that everything will be placed in the proper location in the 14 hive folder.