Novell Survey

[Joseph Sinclair]

I've used a lot of IDE's over the years, including every version of Visual Studio except 2005, and I do mean every version, including 1.0.  It's true that Visual Studio has some great tools for working with code, most of them are available in other IDE's now, including effective integrated debuggers as long as you're not working with C or C++.

Granted, debugging C and C++ on non-Windows platforms is still fairly limited, but very few Visual Studio developers write C and C++ applications anymore.  Most of them are writing C# or Visual Basic.  Even the VS users who are writing C++ are mostly using Managed extensions, which turns C++ into a .Net CLR language (sort of).

The Netbeans IDE has great integrated debugging, better code completion than VS, excellent source and class management, and some of the slickest integrated editing of any IDE out there, and if you're writing Java applications, it's probably the best there is.

Eclipse supports a lot more languages than Netbeans (although both support multiple languages, including Java and C++), but the editing and source management are still top-notch, and if you're writing Java code, the integrated debugging is almost as good as Netbeans (some say it's better).

Haven't been able to get KDevelop to run on my 64-bit system, but I hear it's editing, code management, and class management are excellent.  Again, the big missing feature is integrated debugging.

I've heard that MonoDevelop, which would be the best choice for C#, has editing, code management, and integrated debugging that give VS a run for it's money.  Since it's the only direct competitor to VS in the F/LOSS world, I'd say if it doesn't match or exceed VS now, it will in short order.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that VisualStudio is an excellent IDE (although there are SERIOUS issues if it's run with less than 1G or RAM, and it tends to kill itself if left on overnight), but it's no longer the only top notch IDE available, and the F/LOSS IDE's are rapidly gaining ground, while VS is doing the typical Microsoft "We own the market, so why innovate" deal  I haven't seen a significant improvement since the first VS.NET, and it doesn't appear that VS 2005 is any better (although it will lock you into Microsoft server software a lot more strongly than VS 2003 did...).  There used to be a lot of proprietary IDE's that completely smoked VS in terms of editing and integrated debugging.  Most of those products have been devoured by the Microsoft behemoth, however, so
F/LOSS is, once again, the only real alternative that has any chance of surviving against MS.

Also, keep in mind that VS only supports the Microsoft Windows development, even with C++ it always tries to add links to Microsoft libraries.  In fact I have yet to get it to compile a C++ application without static-linking Windows-specific code into the executable/DLL/whatever.

BTW, I've been known to use text editing and command line myself, still do for the functional languages, XML, and a lot of other stuff not well supported by an IDE, or if I need to make a change quickly.
There still isn't a decent IDE for most functional languages, and it's pretty sad what most IDE's (especially VS) try to pass off as XML support these days.  Also, VS takes 2-5 minutes to load, and many other IDE's take even longer (work machine has a slow HD), so they're only useful if you leave them open for long periods and can do a lot of editing before being pulled to another task.

==Joseph++

Kurt Granroth wrote:
> On Jan 26, 2006, at 11:11 AM, Micah DesJardins wrote:
> 
>> Have you looked at Eclipse? How about KDevelop? What specifically are
>> you looking for that you find in VS that you aren't finding in F/OSS?
> 
> 
> I'm a vim and command line guy, myself, but I've worked with some 
> long-time Windows developers that were transitioning to Linux.  We 
> wanted to make the transition as easy as possible so we set them up 
> with KDevelop first and then Eclipse.  The final opinion was  unanimous:
> neither Linux IDE could come even remotely close to Visual  Studio.  In
> the words of one of the developers (paraphrased),  KDevelop and Eclipse
> were suitable IDEs only if you've never used an  IDE like Visual Studio
> before and hence didn't know what you were  missing.
> 
> If my memory holds true, the major differences were:
> 1. Integrated debugger
> 2. Integrated editor
> 3. Source code and class management
> 
> This was two years ago or so and I've since seen that both KDevelop  and
> Eclipse have gotten a lot better in the last two areas.  Neither  can
> still approach VS in terms of the debugger, though.  And, in  fact, as
> long as 'gdb' is the only real choice for the debugger  backend, neither
> have any chance of being as good.
> 
> Personally, I've never gotten used to the IDE style of editors and 
> source file management so I can't really comment on that.  I have  used
> the VS debugger and once I got used to it, I loathed having to  go back
> to gdb (or even ddd).  Ah, to be able to reliably set  breakpoints on
> classes inside of namespaces and to accurately step in  and out of
> functions...
> 
> Kurt
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