I remember like 10 or so years ago there was no free version of Visual Studio, not even a stripped down “express” version, so I found myself using SharpDevelop instead. Now as I recall, SharpDevelop placed its Solution Explorer on the left, rather than on the right as Visual Studio does. Well, I got so used to this that when I went back to using Visual Studio (I’d used a student license prior to switching to SharpDevelop), the first thing I’d do on a new install is drag Solution Explorer over to the left where it belongs, damn it! 😛 Anyone else do this?
I do this. My first IDE was Eclipse back in the early 0ughts.
Over 15 years ago, because I remember happily downloading VB.NET Express edition when it was released, and then downloaded a combined ISO of the Express version that have almost the same size, plus reduced MSDN and SQL Express with Management Studio in a single image. That introduced me to C# proper.
The other tools I used also put their solution/workspace tool window on the left, Delphi 7, Eclipse & NetBeans. Now that I think about it, even Xcode and VS Code by default put them on the left too.
I downloaded SharpDevelop after Express were released because it’s way smaller than VS Express, comes in portable version (though .NET Framework still needs to be installed), and supported having multiple languages in their own projects interact in a single solution because I still have a soft spot for VB.NET. I also toyed with Boo back then, RIP.
Alas, its stability never really improved, and I left SharpDevelop after it embarrassingly crash just when I try to show it to my friend. I did found it amusing that merely the .NET Framework installation is enough for SharpDevelop to install & actually compile apps, unlike in Java world where you need JDK to actually compile. The size is stupidly large though, upwards hundreds of megs for the official offline installer (which were important because internet access weren’t a given) because it got the x64 (also still a rarity) and IA64 bundled (which no one use outside expensive server rooms). I think I managed to strip the x86 version and bundle it with SharpDevelop portable version to show how a flash drive (128 MB) is enough to turn vanilla install XP (because we often go to cyber cafe) into a .NET development machine.
supported having multiple languages in their own projects interact in a single solution because I still have a soft spot for VB.NET
Huh, Visual Studio didn’t always support that feature? I have a hybrid VB/C# app (oh and it also has some classic ASP pages using VBscript, yay… 😛) I work on for my job in VS2019. Didn’t realize that feature wasn’t always there!
I did found it amusing that merely the .NET Framework installation is enough for SharpDevelop to install & actually compile apps, unlike in Java world where you need JDK to actually compile.
That’s weird. Did they change that recently? I see .NET now has a runtime download and an SDK download… or does the SDK just add the necessary integrations for Visual Studio but if you want to use SharpDevelop you don’t actually need it?
A lot of Java IDEs do this as well. Check out jetbrains rider, I think you’ll like it better than vs.
Hmm. I do have a JetBrains license of some sort that I won as a door prize at a local .NET user group a while back. I used it to download Resharper, but it made Visual Studio horribly slow, so I uninstalled it. I wonder if I could use this license to download Rider too? Is Rider compatible with Visual Studio, such that working in Rider on a solution created with Visual Studio won’t “break” it and render it unusable by folks still using Visual Studio? I know different Visual Studio versions used to have compatibility issues like this, if you “upgrade” a solution from VS2005 to VS2010 or whatever, then you wouldn’t be able to open it in VS2005 anymore…
C# devs
null reference exceptions