Scott on Writing

# re: Have you Used SharpDevelop? 8/18/2003 6:50 AM Richard Tallent

Maybe it's just my coding style, but I need a lot more *EDITOR* and a lot less *IDE* than SharpDevelop or VS.NET offer. I'm currently deciding whether to move from UltraEdit to TextPad as my editor of choice--VS.NET, SharpDevelop, and other IDEs aren't on the list.

Some things that make a good editor that SharpDevelop lacks:
- Fast startup. Eclipse (written Java no less) kicks its butt.
- Simple file editing, w/o the need to organize everything into combines/projects. Just edit the #$@^% file and save it to the same place, thank-you-very-much.
- Advanced text editing. Keyboard commands for case-switching, column editing, macros, sort, remove dupes, multi-file search/replace with regular expressions.
- Flexible color-coding. I want to use the same program to edit CSS, XHTML, JavaScript, VB.NET, C#, T-SQL, plain text, generic XML, legacy ASP, web.config, and a multitude of other file types.
- Brace-match highlighting *while I type*. Absolutely addictive for nested function calls, complex C# logic, etc.

Some things I don't need (granted, 99% of my work is ASP.NET, and development standards that require Mozilla/IE compatibility, proper stylesheets, etc.)
- Wizards
- Templates
- Database browsing
- Winforms design

Some things I miss from IDEs but can live without:
- Intellisense
- "Smarter" color-coding.
- Tooltip method prototypes.
- Automatic case adjustment (UE supports this but tries to adjust case within strings as well, bad for VB.NET where many keywords are also common Engligh words).

Some things I wish someone would add to either a text editor or IDE:
- Split-screen between code/comments to remove need to constantly adjust tab alignment for same-line comments.
- Automatic hyperlinking of properties and called methods back to their source.
- Intellisense for T-SQL.
- Better collapsing/expanding of code blocks that would feel as transparent as navigating the folder tree in Explorer by keyboard.
- Tools to perform common tasks like converting between inline ASP/ASP.NET (<%%>) blocks and code (Response.Write()).
- Spell-checking of literal strings (like Word with red squigglies, not a separate step).

# re: Have you Used SharpDevelop? 8/18/2003 4:27 PM Adam Kinney

Richard:
That's a good idea "Intellisense for T-SQL."

Scott:
I think the concept of the site will prove pretty valuable, but unfortunately I can't think of anything I've used to contribute.

Maybe even just a listing or calling out like this blog entry will help. I'm sure there are already lists of free .NET components, but I would think that reviewed or unreviewed components could show up on the site. Reviewed would of course be more valuable, but Unreviewed might still be helpful.

# re: Have you Used SharpDevelop? 8/18/2003 7:54 PM Scott Mitchell

Adam, good idea. I think if I had to do the Toolbox backend over again, I would have it so that the cental theme wasn't a review, but rather a product. Then there could be links to reviews as well as to download the app, articles on using the app, etc.

# re: Have you Used SharpDevelop? 8/22/2003 10:32 AM James

I just used SharpDevelop to create a medium-sized interactive customer portal for my employer.

Personally, it's everything I need: All that's missing is the in-depth sort of debugging that Visual Studio offers. But every ASP.NET mistake brings up a big stack trace to read through, and I've rarely spent too much time tracking down bugs.

I'm a contractor, and not a rich man. Visual Studio is _friggin expensive_. SharpDevelop offers code completion, lots of keyboard-based/assignable functionality, and management of large libraries. Contrary to what Richard said above, it actually can just open one file, edit it, and save it.

Since i've been learning C# over the last few months, automatic code completion is a huge benefit for me. The program automatically generates MSDN-style compiled HTML documentation based on xml comments. Yes, I was thrilled the first time i used (bundled) NDoc and brought up my new help files. It will make things very pleasant to work with when other coders are pitching in on this project.

So personally, SharpDevelop has offered me everything i need for editing and compiling C# libraries to work with ASP.NET. I create and edit the actual ASPX pages in Web Matrix. However I don't use the visual forms builder in either application - i much prefer to code the layout myself. If I were creating C# windows forms applications I would have more to say about the "visual" half of SharpDevelop. Maybe somebody else could contribute more.

In short: it's free and does everything I need it to, quickly, and with a nice interface. Why would I spend the $$ for VS.NET?

# re: Have you Used SharpDevelop? 8/23/2003 1:39 PM Babu

Richard, you might want to look at SciTE (www.scintilla.org). It is now my favourite editor to carry around in a floppy (600K tops) and has very good customization and feature-set.

# re: Intellisense for T-SQL 9/26/2005 10:29 AM Rommel Abesames

http://www.teratrax.com/tdm/help/intellisense.html
http://www.upscene.com

I'm pretty sure there are a lot of other tools out there.

# re: Have you Used SharpDevelop? 10/15/2005 5:54 AM v.p.singh

SharpDevelop doesnt have good support for database reports (like vs.net has crystal reports). Can we attach crystal reports with our projects in sharpdevelop like we can use that in VB and vb.net. Nice reporting feature would be a nice facility.