At the urging of a co-worker, I downloaded and installed Visual C# .NET Express and gave that language a test-drive.
I had been resistant to it because it fell under the Microsoft umbrella, however a few minutes of using it mostly turned me around on the subject. The UI for designing Windows Apps is something that I have sorely wished for from Eclipse for Java (I’m sure there’s a way to do it, but I’ll be damned if I have found it). The code help is sufficient, the API documentation good… it all seems extremely usable.
Perhaps foremost in my mind is the speed at which the development environment launches… it was remarkably fast, at least 10x faster than Eclipse to start and get me into Development Land. Development Land, for those of you that have not been, is a wonderful place full of horn rimmed glasses, lolcats, and code optimizing physics rides.
If I get the chance later this weekend, I may try getting my little toy application that I put together to hook up to my database environment. I may try to re-write my Dartboard program in this just to try out all of its features and get a feeling for what the IDE acts like in a “live” environment.
All-in-all, I can see why Microsoft zealots so staunchly defend this IDE and its framework… it kind of makes many of the open source efforts look amateurish by comparison. And by kind of, I mean really. A lot.
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