7 ms·

Sharp Develop – Open Source Alternative to Visual Studio

70 points by stevehaunts 13y ago

frozenport 13y ago
VS plugin support is crucial for applications like GPU computing or Qt.
- stevehaunts 13y ago
  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.
  - mattmanser 13y ago
    Anything you find yourself missing when using it?
    - stevehaunts 13y ago
      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.
- ygra 13y ago
  At least for the build system I've written my own MSBuild targets for handling Qt which is much nicer than the Qt Add-in creating custom build rules for each and every file. It's not perfect, but works very well here. The (modest) debugging improvements still let me keep the add-in installed, though.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
72deluxe 13y ago
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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - bad_user 13y ago
    Actually, SharpDevelop is not the same project as MonoDevelop: http://monodevelop.com/ http://monodevelop.com/ MonoDevelop was forked from SharpDevelop but they diverged. Unity has MonoDevelop with Unity-specific patches and they are a little behind. Xamarin Studio is also MonoDevelop with proprietary stuff. Speaking of the "linux version", linux distributions are very far behind in the package versions provided and the folks at Xamarin are only doing packages for OpenSuse. If you want to do development with Mono, Linux is unfortunately not a good OS to be on. Mind you, this is nobody's fault - it's just lack of interest.
    - 72deluxe 13y ago
      Weird, so the best place to develop with Mono is actually on Windows????? What's the point of making it cross platform then?
      - bad_user 13y ago
        No, it's OS X.
      - brokenparser 13y ago
        Don't need no stinkin IDE, just a text editor and a compiler. You'll learn more than when using an IDE.
        rootlocus 13y ago
antihero 13y ago
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?
- tonyedgecombe 13y ago
  It's built with WPF which mono doesn't support, I wouldn't expect to see it happen any time soon.
- giulianob 13y ago
  MonoDevelop is cross platform compatible and its decent but it's certainly no Visual Studio.
teemo_cute 13y ago
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.
Yuioup 13y ago
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.
- stevehaunts 13y ago
  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.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    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.
mariusmg 13y ago
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.
- CmonDev 13y ago
  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.
  - Varcht 13y ago
    I caught a bit of the Build live stream yesterday. Showed some R# like code cleanup in the next version of VS.
    - it_learnses 13y ago
      what's R#? I can't find anything significant on Google.
      - c0achmcguirk 13y ago
        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/
- JasonFruit 13y ago
  It is an alternative, for certain users like me: I occasionally dabble in .NET development. If I had time to spend with Visual Studio, I can tell it would be the better tool, but SharpDevelop is free, fast, and has everything I know enough to use anyway.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
contulluipeste 13y ago
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!
fuj 13y ago
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.
- Paul_S 13y ago
  No, it isn't. It's the best IDE for C# on a windows OS. Important to have those qualifiers.
  - rootlocus 13y ago
    I would really love to have a better alternative for C++ development.
  - zenbowman 13y ago
    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++.
    - Paul_S 13y ago
      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...
- beefsack 13y ago
  Usually calling something the best is entirely subjective, but I believe due to the closed ecosystem surrounding Visual Studio, competitors don't stand a chance regardless of how bloated and cumbersome it is. It's also interesting how analogous that situation is to many others concerning walled gardens in computing.
misnome 13y ago
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.
yiedyie 13y ago
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.
untog 13y ago
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...
JeremyMorgan 13y ago
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.
gavinpc 13y ago
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
- j_s 13y ago
  There are a handful of WinDbg plugins: http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/11/netext http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/11/netext
jason_slack 13y ago
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.
mmgutz 13y ago
PlantUML can't be beat IMHO for UML diagrams. It's the Markdown for UML.

70 points by stevehaunts 13y ago

frozenport 13y ago

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

stevehaunts 13y ago
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.
- mattmanser 13y ago
  Anything you find yourself missing when using it?
  - stevehaunts 13y ago
    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.
ygra 13y ago
At least for the build system I've written my own MSBuild targets for handling Qt which is much nicer than the Qt Add-in creating custom build rules for each and every file. It's not perfect, but works very well here. The (modest) debugging improvements still let me keep the add-in installed, though.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

72deluxe 13y ago

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.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- bad_user 13y ago
  Actually, SharpDevelop is not the same project as MonoDevelop: http://monodevelop.com/ http://monodevelop.com/ MonoDevelop was forked from SharpDevelop but they diverged. Unity has MonoDevelop with Unity-specific patches and they are a little behind. Xamarin Studio is also MonoDevelop with proprietary stuff. Speaking of the "linux version", linux distributions are very far behind in the package versions provided and the folks at Xamarin are only doing packages for OpenSuse. If you want to do development with Mono, Linux is unfortunately not a good OS to be on. Mind you, this is nobody's fault - it's just lack of interest.
  - 72deluxe 13y ago
    Weird, so the best place to develop with Mono is actually on Windows????? What's the point of making it cross platform then?
    - bad_user 13y ago
      No, it's OS X.
    - brokenparser 13y ago
      Don't need no stinkin IDE, just a text editor and a compiler. You'll learn more than when using an IDE.
      - rootlocus 13y ago

antihero 13y ago

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?

tonyedgecombe 13y ago
It's built with WPF which mono doesn't support, I wouldn't expect to see it happen any time soon.
giulianob 13y ago
MonoDevelop is cross platform compatible and its decent but it's certainly no Visual Studio.

teemo_cute 13y ago

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.

Yuioup 13y ago

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.

stevehaunts 13y ago
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.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  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.

mariusmg 13y ago

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.

CmonDev 13y ago
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.
- Varcht 13y ago
  I caught a bit of the Build live stream yesterday. Showed some R# like code cleanup in the next version of VS.
  - it_learnses 13y ago
    what's R#? I can't find anything significant on Google.
    - c0achmcguirk 13y ago
      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/
JasonFruit 13y ago
It is an alternative, for certain users like me: I occasionally dabble in .NET development. If I had time to spend with Visual Studio, I can tell it would be the better tool, but SharpDevelop is free, fast, and has everything I know enough to use anyway.
- rbanffy 13y ago

contulluipeste 13y ago

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!

fuj 13y ago

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.

Paul_S 13y ago
No, it isn't. It's the best IDE for C# on a windows OS. Important to have those qualifiers.
- rootlocus 13y ago
  I would really love to have a better alternative for C++ development.
- zenbowman 13y ago
  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++.
  - Paul_S 13y ago
    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...
beefsack 13y ago
Usually calling something the best is entirely subjective, but I believe due to the closed ecosystem surrounding Visual Studio, competitors don't stand a chance regardless of how bloated and cumbersome it is. It's also interesting how analogous that situation is to many others concerning walled gardens in computing.

misnome 13y ago

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.

yiedyie 13y ago

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.

untog 13y ago

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...

JeremyMorgan 13y ago

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.

gavinpc 13y ago

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

j_s 13y ago
There are a handful of WinDbg plugins: http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/11/netext http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/11/netext

jason_slack 13y ago

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.

mmgutz 13y ago

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