Hi Barry, let me give you my 10 cents. As a long time user of mplab, and a new comer to PBP, I started with mplab as my IDE. I have just recently started using MCS, and I find it much nicer. It provides nice color coding as a huge plus. You could do this with mplab is I call my programs .BAS but its not correct most times.

From a code,compile, and program point of view, I see no advantage to mplab.