

Sharp Develop – Open Source Alternative to Visual Studio - stevehaunts
http://stephenhaunts.com/2014/04/03/develop-open-source-alternative-to-visual-studio/

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mariusmg
No. The word "alternative" implies a certain quality and that you can actually
switch. Sorry but this isn't the case here. I've used SharpDevelop in the past
but there is a world of difference between VS + R# and SharpDevelop.

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CmonDev
I am with you, but I think that Roslyn has a really good change to change
that. Sometimes I wonder how Roslyn will affect JetBrains' business. It should
be pretty easy to re-produce quite a lot of core ReSharper features.

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Varcht
I caught a bit of the Build live stream yesterday. Showed some R# like code
cleanup in the next version of VS.

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it_learnses
what's R#? I can't find anything significant on Google.

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c0achmcguirk
It's resharper. An add-in to Visual Studio that makes refactoring soooo much
better.

[http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/](http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/)

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untog
I have such fond memories of SharpDevelop. In 2006 I was reaching the limits
of the MS Access form designer for an internal database I'd created. I
requested VS Express be installed on my machine but the request was ignored -
enter SharpDevelop, a dream because it didn't require admin rights to install.

Soon I had a VB.NET (shudder, but at the time...) app up and running and using
an Access DB as the backend. I compiled it and distributed in a shared network
folder for the rest of the team.

Utter hack, of course. But the company was working on a SAP-based system that
was going to replace everything, so it didn't matter. I spoke to an old co-
worker last year and what do you know - the SAP system still isn't working
correctly and my old app is still in use. I almost feel guilty...

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Yuioup
I've been following this for a while. I applaud the effort but there is no way
they can keep up with VS. Also Xamarin forked SharpDevelop ages ago into
MonoDevelop, but I don't know if any contributions flow back from MonoDevelop
to SharpDevelop.

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stevehaunts
I don't think it necessarily has to keep up with VS as that will always be a
loosing battle. I just think it needs to feature complete in its own way to
make it a viable alternative, and I think they are at the point of achieving
that.

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rbanffy
If you aim for feature parity with a product from a company that can devote
orders of magnitude more resources (and influence external requirements) than
yours, you'll always lose.

The only way to win is to redefine the criteria by which your products are
measured in a way that your product becomes the superior one and your huge
competitor's can't immediately follow. In this case, you'd have to redefine
what an IDE is supposed to do by building one that's much better in a
significant scenario than VS.

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gavinpc
I'm with Yegge on this one. [0]

That said, I have turned to SharpDevelop at times for the debugger, because
after .NET 2 the standalone CLR debugger was no longer supported. It has some
quirks, but it works.

[0] [https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-
emacs](https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs)

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j_s
There are a handful of WinDbg plugins:

[http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/11/netext](http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/11/netext)

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contulluipeste
At least for C++ native development, a development tool comparison with Visual
Studio is just misplaced. Alex Ionescu, a ReactOS NT kernel developer, in one
question at a Montreal conference last year was asked about the operating
system's attained level of compatibility for applications in general and about
Visual Studio in particular. His answer was that Visual Studio will be the
last piece, as it so intricately fused into the OS internals. It would be
insane to pretend to be able to compete (in every aspect) against something
like Visual Studio which can use undocumented resources not available to
anyone but to Microsoft's own toy!

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fuj
This is nice, but no... it will never replace VS. I'm sorry if I sound
arrogant, but if anyone disagrees than they either never used VS or don't know
its potential. I'm no MS fanboy, but VS is simply the best IDE.

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Paul_S
No, it isn't. It's the best IDE for C# on a windows OS. Important to have
those qualifiers.

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zenbowman
As a Linux user, and someone who really dislikes having to boot into Windows
in general, even I must admit that there is nothing close to Visual Studio for
developing in C++.

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Paul_S
I disagree. Unless you have some trivial C++ project (<100KLOC) you have to
buy the plugin from whole tomato for a 1000$ for VS to be at all usable (at
least last time I had to use VS - has this changed?). Power tools and a couple
of other plugins and you just about get the functionality that other IDEs have
built in. As nice as various specialised things like remote debugging on xbox,
compile on the fly etc. are - overall it's pretty sluggish and limited when it
comes to customisation.

Opinions, opinions, opinions...

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72deluxe
Out of interest, how does this compare with the free editions of Visual
Studio? Is there any compelling reason to use it over them?

I am genuinely interested; I don't do much (any?) C# at the moment.

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stevehaunts
There is a comparison matrix between #develop and VS express here.

[http://community.sharpdevelop.net/blogs/mattward/articles/Vi...](http://community.sharpdevelop.net/blogs/mattward/articles/VisualStudioExpressComparison.aspx)

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72deluxe
Thanks. It looks like you'd benefit from installing both!

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JeremyMorgan
Awesome that this stuff is still around.

I remember working at place in the mid-2000s that needed desktop apps but
didn't pay for Visual Studio (pre-express days) so this is what we chose. We
built lots of good stuff with it.

Looking through that feature list it looks there are still some reasons to use
it over VS express, I'm going to download it tonight and check it out. Working
with it before I remember it being very stable and easy to use.

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antihero
The main problem with Visual Studio for me is lack of portability - now with
Mono, I want to be able to use FOSS tooling to make lovely C# apps, and so
when something like this sprouts up it's like ooh, perhaps it'll be cross
compatible. Nope. Surely if it's _built_ in .NET it can't be that difficult to
make it run on Mono, so why yet another Windows only .NET IDE?

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giulianob
MonoDevelop is cross platform compatible and its decent but it's certainly no
Visual Studio.

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jason_slack
It's unclear if this supports C++ though. The Downloads page says C# only if I
read correctly, however the screenshot for a new project shows C++ and many
other project types....

Anyone know? I'd love to make a Cocos2d-x project so others can have an
alternative to VS.

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misnome
It looks interesting - and I will certainly give it a go the next time visual
studio's WPF designer is running at a snails pace, but it doesn't really seem
like there is much to differentiate it - it mostly looks like a feature-by-
feature clone of visual studio.

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yiedyie
I use it for python and I managed to build a compiled .NET app with SD and
IronPython, and for this feature I will always use SharpDevelop.

But I still like PTVS because it supports autocomplete.

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mmgutz
PlantUML can't be beat IMHO for UML diagrams. It's the Markdown for UML.

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frozenport
VS plugin support is crucial for applications like GPU computing or Qt.

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stevehaunts
yeah i agree. I think sharp develop is coming along very well though. It will
be interesting to see where they go with it. I am going to start using it for
my personal open source projects, but for my commercial work for me and my
teams I will stick with VS as we have MSDN licenses and support agreements in
place.

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mattmanser
Anything you find yourself missing when using it?

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stevehaunts
default support for MSTests would be nice as this is what I have written my
tests in. There is an add-on for it, but it doesn't look that good. Its not
real biggy though, it wouldn't take much effort to migrate my tests over to
NUnit. TFS integration would be good too. For my personal projects I upload my
source to Codeplex and I use the TFS integration for this.

Saying that I could just install the TFS shell extensions and check in/out
code from explorer. Its not that much of a hardship.

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teemo_cute
Visual Studio is indeed very powerful, but its users have to pay the price
with ever increasing complexity. There are far too many options available for
a user at a given moment. Having constraints would be nice. Also, it would be
nice for it to have a full-powered command-line interface for generation.

