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I've always used VS for .NET development, but am just wondering about the alternatives around now. I'm especially interested in use for ASP.NET MVC development. I'm not bothered about any of the visual design aspects of vs, but of course love intellisense and the debugging features.

So, for anyone who has tried SharpDevelop when doing ASP.NET MVC:

  • How did you get on?

  • What are the main disadvantages and pain points?


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Why the vote to close? –  UpTheCreek Mar 17 '10 at 15:54
Seems like a perfectly reasonable, non-subjective question to me. Not sure why the vote to close...? –  Kieron Mar 19 '10 at 11:27
Great question +1! –  used2could Mar 19 '10 at 11:28
@jfar: Man, haven't you got anything better to do? The opening paragraph is important because it states which features matter to me, and which don't. –  UpTheCreek Mar 24 '10 at 10:05
Just an FYI that the Express Edition of Visual Studio does fully support MVC and all tooling. –  emalamisura Mar 27 '10 at 1:54
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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

By the looks of it, SharpDevelop won't have any problems compiling the project and editing the source...you just won't get any tooling support. From what I've read, that includes aspx files.

Having said that, there does seem to be some movement around an ASP.NET plug-in editor for SharpDevelop here.

Source: http://community.sharpdevelop.net/forums/t/7872.aspx

As an aside, it might to nice to update this question with your experiences if you go down that route... (:

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Thanks for the info! I'll check out that link. Will indeed update this post with any exta info I manage to find. –  UpTheCreek Mar 19 '10 at 12:14
No problem, would be interested to know how you get on. –  Kieron Mar 19 '10 at 12:32
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I have used SharpDevelop to create an ASP.Net WebForms project - didn't have too many issues with it. The lack of a visual designer is certainly annoying, but it forces you to think about the source directly, which is a good thing...

I haven't done anything with MVC yet - though from the sounds of things the only thing that's stopping SD at the moment is the tooling. The core developers might have no plans for that, but it's an open source project, so there's nothing stopping an independent effort.

I've gone a very limited amount of work (bug investigation) with the SD code - it seems to me that once you understand their classes it's not bad code... Their failing as a project has been (as it is with most open source efforts) that everyone wants to code, so the documentation gets ignored. No-one likes writing documentation, but clear documentation might have led to far greater participation...

It's a great project, but their decision to ignore the web is madness.

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As Kieron said, you'll be able to compile and you'll lack tooling. Unfortunately, #Develop's forum says that they don't plan to directly support it:

ASP.NET support is not planned for SharpDevelop.

The lack of tooling and knowing that it's not coming anytime soon would be the major pain point for me.

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Thanks for the info re roadmap. It's a real shame - they are really limiting their potential userbase. I would have thought propper ASP.NET support would be reasonably easy to add if one ignored the visual designer. –  UpTheCreek Mar 24 '10 at 10:07
And who uses the designer for ASP.NET anyways? (; –  Kieron Mar 25 '10 at 9:22
........quite :) –  UpTheCreek Mar 26 '10 at 7:32
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