Joerg Plewe's Blog

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.

Comments

• And VS2003 is a major improvement on VS6... But be happy, VS2005 is a lot better still.

  Posted by: jwenting on May 16, 2006 at 02:33 AM

• P.S. you should count yourself lucky. I'm now working in Progress 9. That means:

  no code completion at all
  no context sensitive help
  no refactorings at all
  no vcs integration at all
  no unit testing at all
  no usable syntax highlighting (it's there but extremely flaky so you can't rely on it

  the list goes on and on. Feels like being back coding Cobol in a terminal window linked to a line editor on a mainframe.

  Posted by: jwenting on May 16, 2006 at 02:36 AM

• Try JetBrains (the IDEA people) ReSharper. If you have to spend any amount of time in VS.NET, it's an indispensable purchase. You get real code completion, import settings, reference tracking, code gen from templates, and refactoring. It's as close as you can get to a real IDE in the .NET world. And JetBrains does have a pedigree.

  Posted by: drewmca on May 16, 2006 at 10:38 AM

• I DO use ReSharper (the beta eval). Otherwise I'd be dead. Unfortunately my company hasn't spent that money yet.

  
  I didn't mention ReSharper for this is a blog, not a commercial :). I didn't say there aren't good tools around, but they need to be bought separately. If we mention ReSharper, we should also mention VisualAssist.

  Posted by: herkules on May 17, 2006 at 12:57 AM

• Joege, I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiments - to just be happy, because we are lucky! I worked in team of 18 developers where various colleagues used Eclipse, Netbeans and/or JBuilder. We had great "debates" in the canteen at lunchtimes about our personal favourites. (And I had used IntelliJ for six months prior to that contract, so i threw that into the mix.)

  We are very lucky happy campers to have these great tools, which are in healthy competition, and all catching up to each other very quickly in terms of their "weaknesses", with their own strengths to boast about.

  Personally I think for new young developers, like scholars and students, Netbeans is a great option because of it's out-the-box experience, for all of Swing, web and mobile development - relatively small download, with a Windows installer.
  

  Posted by: evanx on May 17, 2006 at 01:33 AM

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