SharpDevelop Community

At home I a big supporter of Open Source, and am a Gentoo user, however my company develops solely in .Net and without a fairly smooth easy to take transition, I am not sure I would get anyone else to use Sharp Develop instead of going to VS 2005 here in the new year. In fact, without add-ins from VS I wouldn't be able to switch either. So, after noticing a certain lack of features from Visual Studio(in my case in VS 2003 and previewing the VS 2005 before we move to it in the new year) I decided to look around at some VS alternatives. This one came highly recommended from a few places I trust, and in my testing with it, it certainly seems to be working as I need it to and all the functionality from VS 2003 and 2005 I wanted is still available here; that is, except possibly for three:

Firstly, which I know sounds minor, but trust me in order to get others in my company to use this, I would need it... Auto Code beautification or formatting. I found the (Ctrl+I) shortcut, which so far as I can tell works exactly as I would like, but VS 2003 and VS 2005 do this on the fly, they do not require key-stroke. Is there a way to turn this on all the time, rather than only performing code beautification on a shortcut? (Line-off is how VS does it)

Secondly, my company has numerous addins in Visual Studio, and though I have found a few vague references online to Sharp Develop being able to handle VS addins, I cannot seem to find this functionality. Is there a way to use VS addins directly in Sharp Develop, or will I need to recode, or at least rework these addins? I am not sure the work required to rewrite all these addins would be worth the features available in Sharp Develop that are not in VS.

Thirdly, we work in a heavily managed code environment and have many of our own components that are currently in our base build of VS. Adding components is a somewhat slow process each time in Visual Studio, but Sharp Develop seems worse, unless there is something I am missing. The first part of this issue is common to Sharp and VS, but the second part is unique to Sharp.
1) Adding multiple classes at the same time (selecting numerous classes (dlls), or a whole directory) is not possible. As we have at least 18-20 I use almost daily, and probably 45 in common use, this means adding each one separately takes a lot longer than if I could add them in batch.
2) At least in VS I can pick each separate component to add as I go without having to add them from a single class at a time. With Sharp, each class I add overrides the previous, meaning I have to add components one class at a time, lengthening the process even more as many of our classes hold numerous components.

There is no way to use VS Add-ins in SharpDevelop.

See http://www.codeproject.com/cs/samples/LineCounterSDAddIn.asp for an example how to port a VS addin to SharpDevelop.

 

Are you talking about adding components for use in the forms designer? If so, it shouldn't be hard to allow selecting multiple .dlls in the "open assembly" dialog.

So

1) Is on-the-fly code auto-formatting possible yet, or is that a feature request?

2) Add-ins must be "converted"/re-done. Thank you.

3) And yes, I am talking about components for use in the forms designer, and it would be really handy to be able to pull in many classes with many components in each one, all from the browse, so instead of one at a time for 20 minutes, it was a 20 second highlighting those I need, then importing all of them at once.

1) That's not yet possible. We'll consider it for SharpDevelop 3.0.

3) Multiple selection implemented in SharpDevelop 2.1.0.2190

That is a fairly impressive build cycle.

That looks great btw, I was able to add about 61 components across 21 classes in a matter of moments.

So now I will look into converting these add-ins I have, and overall, I have to say, I am fairly impressed with how nice the project looks and how well it works. This is a great example of a well organized and well designed Open Source project.