Joerg Plewe's Blog

May 2006 Archives

NetBeans, Eclipse, IDEA ... pah! VS2003!

There are many discussions around: which is the best IDE?
From my current point of view: take any of these and be happy! Really.

When still working in the Java area, I was used to NetBeans. Many of my collegues used Eclipse, the rich ones used IDEA. Of course, we flamed and discussed a lot about it. IDE is religion.

Nowadays, I have to work with C#/C++ on .NET1.1. The tool of choice: Visual Studio 2003.

Although I worked with Visual Studio for years in the past and felt quite comfortable with it - today I miss everything! Visual Studio is Notepad.exe plus some small extra features. But most of the features we got used to and that make our daily work so enjoyable are missing:

• no usable code completion worth mentioning
• no suggestions about exception handling, redundant using or namespace qualifiers, types,...
• no good VCS integration (beside good'ol SourceSafe, which is not used here)
• no refactorings
• no 'where used'
• no unit testcase generation (TestDriven helps a bit)
• no (insert any point you like about your IDE here)
• no (insert any point you like about your IDE here)
• no (insert any point you like about your IDE here)
• no (insert any point you like about your IDE here)

It feels like being kicked back to stoneage. Not even talking about these ugly, cluttered toolbars, these always-too-small, not resizable dialogs,...

Conclusion: if you can use any of the leading Java IDEs, be happy with it. Really happy. Know that you are far ahead us poor VS guys.

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