Reviews of SharpDevelop

1. 
   Ain Soph Aur

   Reviewing 3.0.0.3037 Beta (Jun 27, 2008)

   WOW, i love it! :D
   im a private user, so its absolutely sufficient.
   
   maybe not so good: only support for .NET framework 2.0 ?!?
2. 
   spiked

   Reviewing 3.0.0.3037 Beta (Apr 19, 2008)

   Although the Visual Studio Express Editions are incredible freebies, they suffer from 2 major annoyances. First, although you can download and install multiple products, they remain separate environments. You're either doing C# development OR VB.net development. That's because they use the "isolated mode" of the VS Shell Runtime. In contrast, the full VS is a single environment where you can seemlessly switch and combine products by choosing different project templates and options. Secondly, instead of having the same UI in the free and full editions (perhaps just graying out the functionality not available in free, or removing those menu items and dialogs while keeping the rest organized the same), MS greatly simplified (i.e. "dumbed down") the UI in Express Editions. If you need to switch back and forth (e.g. you use Pro Edition at work but Express at home for personal/hobby or you occasionally need to help a child or friend who is learning with Express) you often find that Express is just different enough to make common tasks frustrating.
   
   Then there's SharpDevelop, a free environment which (as of 3.0) readily integrates languages from C# to F#, OSS tools such as TortoiseSVN (for source control) and WIX (for installers), and support for a wider range of .net versions than any given version of VS. Although SharpDevelop definitely appeals more to personal usage than enterprise, it has not been dumbed down or intentionally limited in any way.
   
   SharpDevelop was the basis for MonoDevelop, so it's even better than VS if you want to ensure compatibility with Mono for running your .net code on Linux or Mac OS X. Even when you're using VS, there are components in SharpDevelop like the Reports which you may find useful as standalone tools.
   
   Drawbacks to SharpDevelop include a lag in supporting .net improvements (SharpDevelop introduced beta-level compatibility with .net 3.5 about 3 months after VS shipped production-level support for .net 3.5), disruptive s***s due to dependence on other OSS projects which stall or become commercial (such as the replacement of NDoc and NCover with Sandcastle and PartCover), and general incompleteness if you need total equivalence to all VS capabilities (such as an integrated web forms designer and extensive database tools).
   
   Furthermore, with the VS 2008 Shell Runtime, MS is now providing liberal redistribution license and flexible API which has enabled projects like the IronPythonStudio IDE to go from idea to release very quickly and for projects like Phalanger (a .net compiler for the PHP language) to instantly gain a free IDE, somewhat obsoleting SharpDevelop's more monolithic approach, at least for Windows. Projects adopting the VS Shell Runtime approach can take advantage of many add-ins written for VS, while SharpDevelop can only use add-ins written specifically for SharpDevelop.
3. 
   gvanlee

   Reviewing 3.0.0.2970 Beta 1 (Apr 11, 2008)

   It's good, but it ain't perfect. I used it in between two versions of Visual Studio and found it to be lacking of some (to me) important features. Since the Express editions of VS are free now, the standards are pretty high.
4. 
   alexweber15

   Reviewing 2.0.0.1591 (Jul 17, 2006)

   outstanding!
   that was a fast jump from 1.1 beta to 2.0 though!
5. 
   Don Juan

   Reviewing 1.1.0.2118 RC (Dec 14, 2005)

   Great piece of development software. This build seems to have corrected some of the little quirks.

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