Windows Developer Power Tools

6.2 Developing .NET Applications Using SharpDevelop

SharpDevelop is an open source IDE for .NET Framework applications written in C#. It supports applications written in C#, Visual Basic, and Boo, and it provides all of the features required from a modern Windows IDE, such as code completion, project templates, an integrated debugger, and a Forms Designer.

Two versions of SharpDevelop are available: version 1.1, which supports .NET 1.1, and version 2.0, which adds support for .NET 2.0 (and can also be used to target the older .NET Frameworks). The following sections will concentrate on SharpDevelop 2.0 and the features that are not available in Microsoft’s Visual Studio Express, discussed in the previous article.

SharpDevelop has many features to help boost your productivity as you’re writing software. Some of its features include:

• Code completion and autogeneration

• C#, Visual Basic, Boo, Gtk#, Glade#, Console application, and Windows Forms project and file templates

• A Forms Designer for C#, Visual Basic, and Boo

• An integrated debugger

• Unit testing and code coverage

• Integrated NAnt support

• PInvoke signatures

• Code refactoring

• An XML documentation preview

• Language conversion (C# to Visual Basic, C# to Boo, and vice versa)

• A regular expressions toolkit

• Targets .NET Framework versions 1.0, 1,1. and 2.0

• Support for the Mono Framework 1.1 and 2.0

• Uses the same project and solution file format as Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Express

• Extensibility through plug-ins

SharpDevelop at a Glance ...