Andrew Stopford's Weblog

Of course IMHO! It's need backing of a large company first though - IBM developed Eclipse and put it out to an open source community because they had the forsight to but it before profit. Maybe MS should open source VS - that'd do it.

Given your definitions, I think such a product already exists. It's called the "Visual Studio Shell".

msdn.microsoft.com/.../bb933751.aspx

:-p

Or maybe it's called "Eclipse", since you can just as easily modify Eclipse to function as an IDE for C# -- in fact, several already have. Of course, that ultimately involves writing Java to parse and/or compile C#/.NET which makes little kittens cry.

we have SharpDevelop. It's very customizable, has a shell you can add functionality onto, and is OSS. Still, I don't see much interest in it.

Eclipse is written by a team of more than 150 people, working full time on it, with university teams working on the code everywhere in research projects.

That's not going to happen on .NET, not in the next decade.

Would it be great if there was an eclipse for .NET? Of course, it would force MS to actually fix the truckload of tiny annoyances in the IDE instead of adding yet another visual toolkit for the high-payed consultant to do things in the worse possible way.

SharpDevelop isn't even near Eclipse, in any way. Eclipse has many features we on .NET can only dream about, even refactoring is more advanced than resharper gives us today. This is one of the benefits Java has over .NET: in numerous universities, CS departments are doing research using Java as a tool, for example in parser development, refactoring etc. Often they modify code of eclipse to see how their research pans out. Code is then often given back to eclipse in one form or the other and ends up in the eclipse ide sooner or later. VS.NET is closed source and has a horrific extension model (even with shell).

Good lord no...  Having used eclipse for years to write in other languages, it does not hold a candle to Visual Studio.  Although it was stable, it was slow and you can tell that the GUI was designed by *nix people, as it is about as usable as a car with square tires.

It actually turns out that with the announced introduction of MEF to the Visual Studio 2010 shell infrastructure, even the code editor is going to be completely replaceable in VS 2010 so in time the very same 'this is just a platform, it doesn't HAVE to be used for a development suite' that makes Eclipse so flexible will be coming to the .NET world.

Now, whether the actual implementation of all of this matches the present hype coming out of Redmond or not will remain to be seen; after all, these are the very same guys who gave us the 3-5 minute delay on loading the Add-References dialog box... :D

No!  We have Visual Studio and as others have said, if anything is done it should be with the Visual Studio Shell.

Among a lot of other things, I code a lot in c++. Initially, my thesis started off (and got quite some progress) before I switched to XNA (simply for the content pipeline). As I was using C++, I could've used VS or Eclipse. What did I do? Well, it was almost a no brainer. Visual Studio is so much damn better. Now, if only they added some decent UML tools into the mix...Hang on, VS10 is gonna have UML, right?

Eclipse really only handles one case all right, and that is Java. And adding to that it only handles editing java all right. Debugging is really 2nd class compared to VS. Integration with anything but CVS/SVN is anything but a fun experience.

Lately mylyn have somewhat eased the pain of some tedious things, but they are still no match for VS with TFS, not even close. (I would almost go as far as saying the VS with sourcesafe is a better deal...)

And the colloborative editing tools for simultaenous editing are really promising.

But hey it is for free and given that it is a pretty good tool that you can modify if you so please. But actually finding, downloading and building IDE is not a simple task the first time.

And as most free things you get what you pay for.

I use both Eclipse and VS everyday, and then mostly eclipse because most is done in Java (I wish Ms wouldn't have dropped Java from .Net) still. But I much prefer Vs as it is much more productive with less overall issues.

To use eclipse for C++ is really just a viable option if you don't have VS (even then express editions can be viable if you don't use plugins), because even if the VS team hasn't focused enough (or almost zip) on the C++ part of VS ince VS6, it is ahead of eclipse especially in the debugging department, but also in refactoring as the dev express refactor is free for C++.

Ruby in eclipse.. sad story still, Sapphire based VS shell is far better.

XML editor.. getting there, but the MS one is better and I could keep going.

Memory usage, well it's Java, its working set is horrendeous (VS isn't much better, but it is better especially on the working set).

Too many plugins in eclipse and it will really slow down. Custom build triggers go nuts and more often than not using the built in OSGi will get you into class loader problems when eclipse has been running for a couple of days without restart (especially if you load other java programs, shouldn't really effect it, but something is odd, still debugging that).

Eclipse's workspaces are really annoying, at least if you try to use them in somewhat the same ways as solutions (which they are not really meant for). However VS would benefitting from adding workspaces ontop of solution and projects.

So while eclipse is a really good Java editor, it is really all that it does well, at least in the line of work I am doing.

But it would naturally insanely great if VS was open sourced for people with licenses so that we can contribute and fix issues ourselves.

And VS has alot of things that need fixing, such as speed and sluggishness (eclipse is sluggish too but that doesn't mean it gives VS a right to be) and occasional crashes (eclipse ported those as well..)

But I would not want it to be free of charge, as well.. incentives seem to push development of boring features as well as fun ones.

And as always I usually think you get what you pay for.

And VS is a pretty affordable tool for the productivity it gives on a Win32 platform.