SharpDevelop 4.0 Beta 1

ChristophWille — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 18:07:59 GMT

Release Information

Prototyping of SharpDevelop 4.0 started on 5th of August 2008, with first screenshots released even before we shipped SharpDevelop 3.0. The prototype was ported to .NET 4.0 when its Beta 1 was released, and our team shipped a Beta 1 Preview when .NET 4.0 RC became available. Now we have finally reached Beta 1 for .NET 4.0!

The following major changes happened from 3.x to 4.0:

The frame (workbench) has been rewritten to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) instead of Windows Forms. We did not rewrite existing addins to be WPF-only, but many will switch over the course of time.
The text editor is also completely rewritten - from Windows Forms to WPF. The new text editor is called AvalonEdit, and like its Winforms predecessor, it is rehostable in your applications. Articles on that as well as its architecture can be found at http://www.avalonedit.net/

We also made a lot of "smaller" changes:

Alt+Ins has been reimplemented - Siegfried wrote an introduction how the new features work
SharpDevelop supports the new Help Viewer (you have to install the SDK and the Help)
Usage Data Collector – please turn it on! We want to know which features are being used. Expect us to talk more about this feature in the future, as it is entirely reuseable and will come with a reporting Web frontend application. Free & open source usage analysis for your .NET applications!
Martin's GSOC 2010 project is already partially shipping in Beta 1 - check out his blog post on code completion

Speaking of GSOC 2010 - we have four projects in the works this year:

Martin is working on refactoring features
Siegfried on VB.NET 10 support
Tomas on code quality analysis
Devvrat on the WPF designer (the Beta 1 designer is not recommended for production use)

With the exception of Martin's work, you won't see any work of the other students reflected in Beta 1. Please support our students by giving feedback - subscribe to the RSS feed of our team to be notified when they or other team members ask for feedback!

Note that a lot of articles are available shedding more light on Beta 1 on our work - check it out, some assorted cool stuff:

Compiling for .NET 4.0 without installing the Windows SDK (link)
Unit testing with IronPython (link)
Custom unit test runners (link)
Windows 7 customizations - the task bar (link)

A few features are not completed or not properly connected, one example being the new database addin. Expect us to talk more about those once they reach our quality goals.

What is the roadmap for SharpDevelop 4.0? All planned features are under active development, our goal is to ship Beta 2 after our annual developer days end of July.

Known Issues

If you use the Windows Forms Designer, the generated resource files can be used only in .NET 4.0. Avoid editing .NET 2.0 forms, there's currently no easy way to convert the resources back.
Targetting the Compact Framework is not supported in this Beta release. SharpDevelop will crash if you try to create/open a CF project.
The Boo compiler coming with SharpDevelop does not yet support .NET 4.0.

Downloads

SharpDevelop 4.0 Beta 1

Beta 1 is built against .NET Framework 4.0 Full – you must install it first. Download

Please note that .NET 3.5 SP1 is required too, and the Windows SDK is strongly recommended.

SharpDevelop can take advantage of the following software if you install it:

Microsoft StyleCop
TortoiseSVN (Source Control)

Support

Our primary means of support is via our Web-based forum (please do not email team members directly unless they advise you to do so in the forum)