Note to Self 9 – Exploring SharpDevelop and Going off Topic

It’s been too long since I last blogged which typically means I have too many competing ideas to settle on just one. So welcome to Note to Self 9!

• SharpDevelop is an open source IDE for the .NET platform. Is it new? Hardly. Based on the history of news releases from their website, It’s been around since December of 2000. Considering that the .NET platform was publicly announced only 6 months earlier, SharpDevelop seems only that much more mature.
• If you’re comfortable with the basics of Visual Studio, SharpDevelop should feel like home to you. In fact, the best way to describe SharpDevelop is “Visual Studio without a lot of stuff I don’t want and a few thid-party items I do”.
• SharpDevelop uses NUnit instead of MSTest. That’s right. No third party plugins to make your IDE work with NUnit. It simply works.
• It’s time for me to confess. It’s all about IronPython. The reason I started investigating SharpDevelop is because of my frustration with Visual Studio’s lack of support for the language. Specifically, I want Intellisense when I write IronPython. To be sure, you only get Intellisense for “non-DLR code”, but surprisingly that doesn’t seem to be as much of a handicap as you might think.
• Speaking of first class citizens, SharpDevelop comes stock with C#, Visual Basic, Boo (I can hear Jay Wren cheering now), IronPython and F# (now a number of SRT folks are cheering).
• If you’re frightened of the consequences that may come from changing your development environment, don’t be. You can open one of your existing Visual Studio solutions with SharpDevelop and start coding. Switching back is as simple as opening up your now modified project/solution in Visual Studio.
• For clarity, SharpDevelop is new to me. I haven’t used SharpDevelop for any projects yet so I can’t tell you about any of its nuances. I plan on putting it to the test, however, over the next several weeks. I’ll be posting about my experiences.
• Now for the off-topic part. I’ve been listening to The History of Rome, a FANTASTIC podcast series on, well, the history of Rome. Mike Duncan, creator and narrator, is not only an engaging story teller, but also has the technical savvy to put together a professional podcast. Though it’s not the sort of podcast typically on a geek’s menu, I think there are enough parallels to some of the challenges we are facing in the software industry to make it worthwhile.