Srinivasan A Paul Joseph

SharpDevelop vs Visual Studio

February 12, 2009 Alternatives, Comparisons, IDEs, Open Source

As my previous post on SharpDevelop explained, SharpDevelop in many ways a better alternative to Visual Studio. However, the significant differences between these two and the advantages or disadvantages over each other are explained here.

Advantages of SharpDevelop over Visual Studio:

1. Open Source (Full Source Code available freely)
2. Completely Free to use for both Commercial and Personal use
3. Supports all .NET Framework, Compact Framework, WinForms (with excellent extra GTK# for X-Window based systems), Console Application, Direct3D (wow, Game Development anyone?), WPF, and Windows and Web Services.
4. Supports additional languages like Boo, F#, ILAsm and Python (very good)  out of box apart from C# and VB.NET.
5. Supports Installer Creation (a very likeable feature works better than VS in my opinion)
6. Light on Resources faster on Building (refer Point 8 below). The last time I checked, has only 80 KB of RAM with 0.x% CPU Usage even after opening a bulky WinForms project and keeping couple of forms open in design mode. (A relief from VS’s usual 128 KB or more RAM and 4-5% CPU Usage)
7. Inbuilt Refactoring Engine (you’ll need JetBrains ReSharper if you want this in Visual Studio)
8. Parallel Build support for Multi-core machines (faster building, very likeable feature which is sadly not available in VS)
9. Supports important Visual Studio add-ons like FxCop, StyleCop, NUnit, PartCover etc.
10. Version Controlling with Subversion (which is far better a solution than VSS. I’ll post another post soon explaining the benefits of SVN over VSS)
11. Wide range of very useful Add-ons (as the case with most Open Source projects)
12. Inbuilt Documentation Generator (Sandcastle, SHFB)
13. Very likeable Class Diagram and Code Coverage views
14. Very likeable F# Interactive, Boo Interpreter and Python Console
15. Supports Mono (the alternative .NET 2.0 Framework for Linux, BSD and Mac OS X)

What I see as disadvantages of SharpDevelop:

1. Code Editor has some minor glitches (I’ve seen some glitches on code folding and unfolding though it’s just visual not physical)
2. Lack of VSS Support (though I’m not looking forward to it as it’s a proprietary version control system to be included in any open source project like this)
3. Lack of Visual Studio like Object Browser (I miss that one here, though #Develop has very good Class Browser)
4. Somewhat Buggy (I’ve seen it crashing sometimes but understandable due to its Open Source nature)

But apart from this, programmatically speaking, you can do everything that you can do in VS with #Develop. It’s pretty impressive for a Open Source project.

Tags: Alternatives, Comparisons, Open Source, SharpDevelop, Visual Studio