Road test: .NET development without Visual Studio
Monday, June 27, 2005 05:16 PM
Since the introduction of Visual Studio, Microsoft has held a near monopoly on integrated development environments(IDEs) for it’s own developer tools. With the release of Visual Studio.NET and the .NET Framework, Microsoft’s grip on the developer tools market has slipped with a number of free or low-cost development tools available for .NET coming on the market in the past few years.
This article delves into some of the options you may consider when looking for an IDE for .NET development. As a new developer to the .NET platform or if you are concerned about the rising cost of the development tools, you may find some of the tools we cover may be all you need to develop robust .NET applications, without going to the expense of buying Visual Studio.NET.
There is one tool that we left out completely — and that is Notepad. There are some developers out there who would tell you that you can develop a .NET application from scratch using nothing more than Notepad and your own wits. We preferred to stick to the tools that are “value add” and provide some additional features and functionality you won’t find in Notepad.
Getting started
Regardless of which tool you choose in the end, the first thing you should do is download and install the .NET Framework and the .NET Framework SDK from either the Microsoft download center or from MSDN. The SDK contains all of the tools and compilers you will need to create .NET applications.
Likewise, if you are planning on distributing or deploying your .NET applications, you may want to download the .NET Framework redistributable, which you can include with any setup program or instructions.
| Ease of use | To start, we evaluated how easy each tool was to learn and use as compared to Visual Studio.NET, including an evaluation of the design environment itself, placement of commonly used items, etc. and the general overall impression of the tool. |
| Features and functionality | Covering features included within the design environment for reducing development time and manual coding of common tasks, features that are included in Visual Studio.NET and/or not present in the alternate tool. |
| Code development | Most .NET developers will spend a good portion of their time writing code and with this set of criteria, we are judging how well the tool is suited to coding, including debugging features, step-throughs. |
| Platform and language support | One of the tangible benefits of looking at Visual Studio.NET alternatives is that most of the tools we reviewed support multiple platforms and languages and in this criteria, we look at how well this support is developed. |
| Documentation and support | Another key area is the documentation and support that is available for each tool. We look at whether the documentation is organised and well written and also look at the support and user communities around each. |
| Cost | And finally, cost was the last criteria that we evaluated, with tools ranging from free to a few thousand dollars per developer, there was definitely some disparity among the tools we selected. |
| Table 1: Evaluation criteria | |
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I think you have been overly generous with SharpDevelop. It's not excellent. I recently tried the latest version and found it very unstable. It hangs on every exit, the documentation is incomplete and out of date with the latest version, and I frequently got ugly popup error messages when moving info to the clipboard. yes, it's free, and it shows.
Posted by Jon Paal on Thursday, June 30 2005 05:11 PM