Info Tech Scraps » .NET

SharpDevelop vs Visual Studio

Srinivasan A Paul Joseph — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:59:16 +0000

As my previous post on SharpDevelop explained, SharpDevelop in many ways a better alternative to Visual Studio. However, the significant differences between these two and the advantages or disadvantages over each other are explained here.

Advantages of SharpDevelop over Visual Studio:

Open Source (Full Source Code available freely)
Completely Free to use for both Commercial and Personal use
Supports all .NET Framework, Compact Framework, WinForms (with excellent extra GTK# for X-Window based systems), Console Application, Direct3D (wow, Game Development anyone?), WPF, and Windows and Web Services.
Supports additional languages like Boo, F#, ILAsm and Python (very good) out of box apart from C# and VB.NET.
Supports Installer Creation (a very likable feature works better than VS in my opinion)
Light on Resources and faster on Building (refer Point 8 below). The last time I checked, has only 80 KB of RAM with 0.x% CPU Usage even after opening a bulky WinForms project and keeping couple of forms open in design mode. (A relief from VS’s usual 128 KB or more RAM and 4-5% CPU Usage)
Inbuilt Re-factoring Engine (you’ll need the paid software JetBrains ReSharper if you want this in Visual Studio)
Parallel Build support for Multi-core machines (faster building, very likable feature which is sadly not available in VS as of 2005)
Supports important Visual Studio add-ons like FxCop, StyleCop, NUnit, PartCover etc.
Version Controlling with Subversion (which is far better a solution than VSS. I’ll post another post soon explaining the benefits of SVN over VSS. You can of course use AnkhSVN to get this in Visual Studio though.)
Wide range of very useful Add-ons (as the case with most Open Source projects)
Inbuilt Documentation Generator (Sandcastle, SHFB)
Very likable Class Diagram and Code Coverage views
Very likable F# Interactive, Boo Interpreter and Python Console
Supports Mono (the alternative .NET 2.0 Framework for Linux, BSD and Mac OS X)

What I see as disadvantages of SharpDevelop:

Code Editor has some minor glitches (I’ve seen some glitches on code folding and unfolding though it’s just visual not physical)
Lack of VSS Support (though I’m not looking forward to it as it’s a proprietary version control system to be included in any open source project like this)
Lack of Visual Studio like Object Browser (I miss that one here, though #Develop has very good Class Browser)
Somewhat Buggy (I’ve seen it crashing sometimes but understandable due to its Open Source nature)

But apart from this, programmatically speaking, you can do everything that you can do in VS with #Develop. It’s pretty impressive for a Open Source project.

A better alternative to Microsoft Visual Studio from Open Source community

Srinivasan A Paul Joseph — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:24:05 +0000

Ever wondered how you could live without the Microsoft Visual Studio for your .NET development and learn to live with its memory consumption that bogs you down every time you run it? Well, I do. And I always find the command-line runnable .NET Framework fascinating to develop a much lighter IDE than the Visual Studio. And of course, the ever present question of Licensing costs for a product that is really not needed to develop in .NET Framework (I mean matter-of-factly).

Now, you can shed all your worries of that and embrace the open source community for making a powerful Open Source IDE named SharpDevelop. It was so powerful that you can seriously consider it for a complete drop-in replacement of Microsoft Visual Studio. It supports almost all of the Visual Studio features and much more. It supports Subversion for Version Control. In my opinion Subversion is far great an Version Control system than VSS. Here is the screen shot of how it looks:

Now run .NET Framework across multiple OS Platforms

Srinivasan A Paul Joseph — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:18:09 +0000

I could say it’s been a dream of myself ever since I started coding the .NET Framework 1.0 in 2002. But I never thought it would became a reality given Microsoft’s nature on being the one that rules everyone.

But, the powerful community of enthusiastic Open Source developers and the Industry leader in Linux and Networks, Novell had together made it a reality at last.

I found some months before upon googling that there is an open source implementation of the CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) and the CLR (Common Language Runtime) for the C#.NET language and .NET Framework 2.0 based on Microsoft’s somewhat open source like, Shared Source CLI (Rotor). It was a pleasant surprise and upon digging I found it was really around for a long time. The project is called Mono (Spanish for Monkey) and is available at the Official Website here.

The latest version Mono 2.0 is pretty much grown and stable product. It supports both WinForms and Web Programming as in .NET Frameworks and allows your code to run from any latest version of Linux, UNIX (BSD), Mac OS X, and of course, Windows. The WinForms version of the Mono Framework also allows to have GTK# (a C#.NET implementation of the GTK+ – the cross platform windowing toolkit for X Window system along with Qt) as an alternative to have much native support for X Window based systems (UNIX, Linux and Mac).

Currently the Mono 2.0 version support the following languages: C#.NET, Java, Boo, Nemerle, VisualBasic.NET, Python, JavaScript (JScript), Oberon, PHP, Object Pascal, LUA, Cobra and various other third party developed add-ons supporting custom languages. I would say this is WOW!!! I can never thank the Open Source community and Novell more enough for such a great product.

Please go ahead and check it out…