It's a fantastic initiative -- in such a short time we see many IDEs support consistent auto-complete, refactoring and so much more.
I think IBM was first with supporting refactorings for Java in Visual Age and Eclipse. Refactorings themselves emerged out of the Smalltalk community.
MS was very motivated to support that for C# as they were getting worried about losing marketshare to Java at the time and because J++ got a lot of negative press (compatibiltiy issues, vendor lockin, the usual MS stuff). In the end C# was held back by the same factors that held back J++ and it took them until very recently to openly support it on platforms other than Windows.
Microsoft intellisense (aka code completion) was truly a first back in 1997 (then just for VB and C++).
But beside smalltalk, there were lots of others. All the commercial Lisps, Dylan etc. Somewhat more mainstream-ish - the NeXT Objective C environment is a good and much earlier example.
There were lots of interesting things about .NET when it came out, the IDE-ness of it doesn't strike me as one of them at all.
