Discussion on:

Explore alternatives to Visual Studio .NET

No mention of Borland's IDE for .NET...Delphi and C#, C++ coming...

The legion of Delphi developers have a .NET alternative too...

Delphi2005 is a fine IDE that can handle both the Object Pascal language and the C# language. A language translation plug-in is (will be) available in 2Q 2005.

well, I read in the newsletter "PROS and CONS" and what I read is just an incomplete list of alternative IDE. Sure some of them are good, but what about the CONS? no word spent of that.. or can I do with ASP.NET Web Matrix all I can do with Visual .NET? what about SharpDevelop? ... really poor article.

I agree totally. He lists a lot of the IDE's, but the text seems to be pulled from the respective websites. I mean, has the author even used any of these?

For instance, I think SharpDevelop is promising, but when I used it a few months ago I found that loading a project caused SharpDevelop to use 90 MB of memory, and as I edited files the memory usage grew to over 160 MB of memory for a single SharpDevelop instance--and the memory was never reclaimed until I shut down SharpDevelop completely. A glaring memory leak is not worth a mention?

With that same IDE, the Intellisense is there, but slow, and it feels awkward in its presentation. These were the sorts of details I was hoping for with the various IDEs, but this article gave me nothing except a list for me to do my own future reasearch--something I could have found in half an hour on google.

Articles here aren't usually like this, Thank God.

I'm actually surprised that the list included all it did. Generally, lists like this would probably ignore any platform that doesn't run Microsoft offerings, but Visual Studio only runs on Windows and this article certainly isn't limited to the Windows platform.

Right now, I'm just waiting for the Mono/.NET framework to be attached to GNUstep so that it'll be available in my favorite programming environment.

For text editors, I would have liked to see SciTE mentioned. It's the best programming/scripting GUI text editor I've encountered, for my tastes at least, and it runs on several platforms (including Windows and Linux systems).

P.S. Do you think you'd be happy if your product was described as like Frontpage.
Put me off straight away.

I think Borland was the first to come out with .NET IDE before VS Studio.NET came about

When the .net framework was released as a pre beta in 2000, Microsoft released Visual Studio 7 beta, which worked with the .NET framework. It was a bit shaky as a pre beta, but was a great learning tool for what was to come.

I did my first .net project using sharpdevelop. I would say anyone with limited budget and need a decent coding environment for .net should try this software.
No comments on the MS VS.Net as I have not tried it yet, but I definitely would recommend SharpDevelop for those who are not sending rocket and building a desktop application or a .NET website.
Neither VS.NET or SharpDevelop can run on other platforms. This certainly is not a disadvantage for SharpDevelop.

One of the things I enjoy about VS.NET is the ability to easily develop a deployment package for any app (whether it's a simple Word template or a full VS.NET app). Do any of the mentioned (or not mentioned) alternatives carry an equivalent easy-to-use deployment component? Thanks!

I personally use "Winsyntax" ( it was a "Free App") as an all purpose programming editor. Color hi-lighting (after "Save As") for a goodly list of programming languages.


In Linux/KDE the "Kwrite" also adds color highlight to a massive list of languages

Kukunet

A little harsh some of you. Please...kindness goes a lot further than destructive criticism. The author said it was a "high level" look at the alternatives to a pricey (I agree) IDE. The article fulfilled its destiny. If you want to know more, you can do your own homework. Each developer has his own preferences, anyway; hence, the myriad of options out there.

I didn't even know some of these options existed, much less seriously considered an alternative to VS.NET.

Thanks for the article!
Ling

Another freely available text editor, which supports syntax highlighting based on the language selected, is Notepad++. This can be downloaded from http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net.

Please check out "Pao" at http://pao-ide.info , a very inovative IDE for .net. Every language construct is an object with rich features. It's in early stage and actively updating.

Visual Studio Professional costs $2084 in Australia now, despite the fact that AUD and US$ are almost equal in value at the moment. This seems ridiculous, and does not provide an incentive for home users to use .Net. The Express version is fine for LEARNING, but too limited for much else.