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SharpDevelop Hit the 3.0 Milestone

by Abel Avram on Mar 03, 2009 |

The SharpDevelop community has released version 3.0 of the free open source .NET IDE. SharpDevelop (#Develop) features support for .NET 3.5, C#, VB.NET, F#, Code Completion, Auto Code Insert, Refactoring and others.

Code written in SharpDevelop 3.0 can be targeted at .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 featuring full MSBuild 3.5 support. A number of .NET languages are available:

C# – with code completion and Windows Forms Designer
VB.NET - with code completion and Windows Forms Designer
Boo - with code completion and Windows Forms Designer
IronPython – as an Add-in
F#

For development productivity, SharpDevelop 3.0 provides Refactoring, Auto Code Inserting, Multi-core support. The application can be started from a USB memory stick. There is a series of testing/debugging tools integrated with the IDE:

Integrated Debugger
Code Analysis (FxCop)
Unit Testing (NUnit)
Code Coverage (PartCover)
Integrated Subversion support (TortoiseSVN)
StyleCop addin

Additional important features are:

WiX Setup Projects
Parser-based Code Converter
XML Code Completion
Documentation generation (Sandcastle, SHFB)
Reflector addin
VC++ project support
Mono support
Snippet Compiler

SharpDevelop 3.0 is freely available under GNU Library General Public License (LGPL). Microsoft also offers several editions of Visual Studio Express for free. One might choose SharpDevelop over VS Express for some features not available in the later like Mono support.

Useful links: Download page (source code and binaries), SharpDevelop web site, CodePlex mirror site, SharpDevelop Community site.

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Community comments

No SMC in Express Editions. by Miguel Ping Posted

SharpDevelop is light and fast by Raffaele Guidi Posted

No SMC in Express Editions. by Miguel Ping

The most important feature missing in MS Studio Express is SCM integration. I'll give SharpDevelop a spin just because of that.

SharpDevelop is light and fast by Raffaele Guidi

ok, It lacks something in webapps debug and visual development but if you have just to build winforms or libraries it is a breeze - it starts and compile (and does everything) in a fraction of time of VS