Ciaran’s Random Writings

I decided to hack together a quick GUI front end for CouchDB to help with my tinkering around. Most people will probably groan and stop reading now, because I implemented it in C#/.NET. Although I’m not going to apologise for that, I do feel the need to justify it:

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I’ve moved a medium-sized non-critical project from VS 2003 to SharpDevelop to see how things go. Here are a few random observations from briefly playing around.

1. There doesn’t seem to be any visual edit capabilities for menus, or if there is I can’t find it. This is no great loss, as I’d rather edit the code anyway. In a way, it would be better if there were no designer facilities at all, then I wouldn’t be tempted to use them.
2. The code completion kicks in when you’re editing comments. Attempting to type “new picture” in a comment requires pressing the escape key at the right time to get rid of the code completion. I find code completion irritating enough when typing code, but when typing English it’s a nightmare. I could disable it I suppose, though I would rather have the option to use it (when I ask) instead of it butting in.
3. The search interface seems very unfriendly, at least the way I’m using it. I press ctrl-F, the search dialog appears, I type the text, and hit return. On VS, I can then press Escape to get rid of the dialog, but with SharpDevelop the only option seems to be to reach for the mouse and click the minature ‘x’ button.
4. The editor seems to suffer from some serious performance issues when there are lots of icons in the left margin.
5. Apart from a few bits of tinkering with imports, and the ditching of the Setup project, the whole thing worked straight away.

That’s all for now.

I’ve had my eye on the SharpDevelop project for a while now. SharpDevelop is an open-source IDE for languages that run under Microsoft’s .NET Framework, or it’s open-source equivalent, Mono. Earlier versions have looked promising, but not yet convincing, but last weekend was my first good look at version 2.

Essentially, SharpDevelop is a clone of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, although many differences are apparent from the word go. A good deal of these are differences for the better - the most notable being the ‘forms editor’ which is so far superior to Microsoft’s effort that they ought to be ashamed. On the downside, debugger support is still a little flaky (though less so than last time I looked) and lacking in features.

I needed a small app to provide a quick friendly UI for editing some data stored in XML files, so I used the opportunity to take SharpDevelop for a test drive. It performed almost flawlessly, and the mini-project was a success. Of course, success in a minor development task like this doesn’t mean it’s ready to take on large-scale application development. I’m not convinced it is quite there yet, but my next excursion with it will be to try and transfer a large project across from VS.NET to SharpDevelop and see how it performs.

When you consider that this is free, and we’re currently staring down the barrel of a multi-thousand pound bill to upgrade a small development team from VS.NET 2003 to VS.NET 2005, perhaps the better option would be to wait, or even make any necessary fixes ourselves.

The only shocker was that my tiny app had a 9MB memory footprint on startup, but I can’t point the finger at SharpDevelop for that, because the same was true when I compiled it with Visual Studio - no surprises there since both use the framework’s compiler.