SharpDevelop 4.0 Final

ChristophWille — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:42:56 GMT

Release Information

Welcome to final version – the release – of SharpDevelop 4.0!

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. The team went through four Beta releases and two release candidates before hitting our release milestone today.

Feature highlights of SharpDevelop 4.0

WPF Designer
Entity Framework (EF) Designer (details)
C# 4.0 support
VB.NET 10 support (details)
New productivity features (details)
Alt+Ins has been reimplemented (details)
Code completion in IronPython
Unit testing with IronPython (details)
Unit testing with IronRuby (details)
Custom unit test runners (details)
New Git source control addin
SharpDevelop supports the new Help Viewer (details)
Grouping support in SharpDevelop Reports (details)
Usage Data Collector – please turn it on! We want to know which features are being used.

Major architectural changes 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/

Downloads

SharpDevelop 4.0

SharpDevelop 4.0 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:

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)