If you are considering moving to .NET development and don’t want to break the bank by forking out the money for Visual Studio Builder have a comparison of .NET tools you might want to use. The review includes SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop, XDevelop, Visual SlickEdit, and DreamWeaver.
Road test: .NET development without Visual Studio
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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The reviewer says that the interface is bad, but provides no screenshot and no specific details. I get the feeling that he didn’t really even try to use it…
What about Visual Studio Express? It’s free.
According to the the VS Express FAQ:
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/faq/default.aspx
Are the Express Edition products free?
Our plan is to offer the Express products for $49 per product when they are released.
Eclipse is clearly the best IDE framework for this type of development.
Someone should develop/improve the current .NET/Mono plugins for Eclipse and get it on par with Java’s JDT for Eclipse.
The reviewer says that the interface is bad, but provides no screenshot and no specific details. I get the feeling that he didn’t really even try to use it…
More important than screenshots, IMHO, are statements supporting his argument. As a software developer myself, I am always glad for positive and constructive criticism. It allows me to improve my work even more.
What about d2k5 ?
>Eclipse is clearly the best IDE framework for this type of >development.
To some extent yes, but I think it depends on what kind of development, if it’s backend server stuff then maybe the answer is yes but for GUI work there is no contest, it’s either VS.NET or D2005 for GUI work. In terms of productivity these surpass anything else I’ve tried, including Eclipse.
I haven’t worked on any huge projects but in Windows I prefer using TextPad/NDoc/NAnt to do my .Net programming.
SharpDevelop has integrated support for NDoc and NAnt, as well as NUnit if you’re into tested code. The only thing it’s weak on is ASP.NET in my experience.
He never said the interface was bad, he said it was different and may take a while to get used to.
He praised the user interface as being “Rich”.
So is it only my copy of IE6 that goes bang at every link to the builder website ?
sharpdevelop – no debugger
visual slickedit – no gui designer
Delphi 2005 – has poor intellisence,
(f.e. no delegate completion for events),
and poor debugger(f.e. no collection expansion)
I think VS.Net + CodeRush is best, moreover,
when .net 2.0 is out, there will be only one good editor
available – and it’s VS2005
VS Express is affordable (expected 49$) and the best IDE around imho.
DreamWeaver – I never knew Macromedia gave it for free…..
I’ve tried SharpDevelop, and it’s fair. But In case I’d spend the 50$… It’s not *that* much even for a poor student like me, come on…
ECB
The remarks on MonoDevelop are fair but understandable. How many developers have Microsoft got working on VS.Net compared to the people working part time and at no cost on MonoDevelop. A lot of developers have given up their valuable spare time to contribute to a product with a lot of potential. I for one use it all the time. Ok it is quirky and intellisense is too slow to use at this time, but things can only get better. VS2005 is a fantastic IDE but it is only for windows. If your vision goes no further than windows this is the best one for you.
Novell should put their weight behind this project, how good is a framework without a decent development enviroment?
They forgot to include Borland C# Builder.
Geez, that is a big one too!
Just buy VS.NET (2005, when it comes out). It’s toataly worth it.
Shame Borland did not put as much effort into marketing this as they did with the original C++ Builder which was an excellent IDE.
<em>MonoDevelop is an open-souce project that is part of the much-hyped Mono Project</em>
<em>You would be hard-pressed to create a production-quality application using this toolset but it may suffice if you have only simple Web applications to develop or if you want to develop on one the supported platforms and don’t have an alternative.</em>
<em>As a contendor to Visual Studio.NET, MonoDevelop does not even come close — with a concentrated effort by the project’s contributors they could increase the features and functionality to bring the tool up to scratch, but it will be months or years before it can stand on its own against Visual Studio.NET.</em>
It is hard for me not to use profane languange when expressing my let down for this bias and prejudiced article.
Too bad really.
I am going to keep using the always improving MonoDevelop as well as thousand others of my .NET Developer peers.
Interesting that the reviewer gives Monodevelop one check for UI design. Monodevelop has no forms designer!
The article is absolutely interesting. The pieces about MonoDevelop being a multiplatform application is especially ironic. MonoDevelop is very multiplatform, as long as your platform is mono + linux. So. yeah. Irony.
I would be very interested to see what version of MonoDevelop was actually tested, because the most recently released version of MonoDevelop supports C#, VB, nemerle, boo, ilasm, java, and a beta IronPython binding. Which (ironically) makes it support *more* languages than.. well… any of the others listed.
Also interesting is the mention of designing a production quality application, and then specifically pointing to webapps. MonoDevelop doesn’t support web apps at all, so developing web apps with it would kind of backwards.
Also, MonoDevelop doesn’t distribute NUnit. mono does.
Anyway, a very ‘interesting’ article, but it would have been nice if the reviewer had mentioned which version he was using. I suspect he was using 0.5.1, which is over a year old at this point, and is not really something that I would consider ‘current’.
I was glad to see that Slick was considered in the review.
I’ve been a long time user of SlickEdit and it is totally awesome. Even though I use Visaul Dev 2003 (its good too!), I find so many tasks are much faster and easier in SlickEdit. I do most of my code editing in Slick and turn to VisDev for UI construction and debugging.
btw, there is a SlickEdit linux version too. I use that to create, compile and debug gcc code. Cool stuff!
Tried to install it on Mandrake 10.1, but it’s dependency hell at it’s worst. As a sidenote, the choice of the development tools says nothing about the quality of the result. Some people can create production quality software with notepad and a command line compiler, while others create scrap with the most expensive and sophisticated tools available.