Which IDE do you use for Linux development? About once every six months, I’ll do a Web search on this to see what people are using. Seems like KDevelop (of course), Eclipse and the redoutable Emacs remain the environments of choice.
I came up in assembly on micros, then DOS, and then Windows. The first time I ever tried Microsoft’s Visual Studio under Windows 95/98, I was absolutely hooked. Not only does it generate the application framework for you, the resources editor (i.e., where you design and build the dialogs, buttons and other eye candy) is 100%, totally integrated into the source editor.
For those who’ve never used it (and apparently, many of the people making comparisons between even Glade – which I’ll admit, is nice and comes close – obviously haven’t):
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I want to add a dialog to my application. I use a drag-and-drop editor to make look exactly as I wish, then Visual Studio automatically adds it to the application. I don’t have to do anything else except “call” it when I want it to appear. It’s all done for me.
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I want to add a button to this dialog. I drag and drop a new button, make it look like I want, and then right-click for the Class Wizard. I can then see all messages/events that might be generated by that control, choose one of them, and Visual Studio will automatically generate the handling function for me, making all “connections” between the button and the rest of the code. All I have to do is poke in my application-specific code. The framework is automatically generated with do-nothing handlers.
That last part is the key. Nothing I’ve seen for Linux can do this (some of them, like Glade, come close, but still require a lot more work). In my job, programming is a secondary function. I don’t have weeks to tweak and get something right.
Ergo, my fellow Linux Lovers: if you want to know why things like Visual Basic, Visual C++ (which I use) and other Microsoft tools continue to dominate (and thus, Windows), there’s one good reason why: I can sit down with Visual Studio and knock out a call screening program for our talk studios in a single weekend. This isn’t just eye candy, either – it “talks” to the telephone system, can tell if a call is ringing in, on hold, or on air, etc., etc … and even allows instant messaging between the show host and the board operators in the control room.
In one weekend. Not even a hard weekend, either.
Is anything like this available for Linux? I would DEARLY love to move our remaining stuff from Windows over to F/OSS, but this prevents me: I have to write this stuff and Visual Studio makes it quicker and easier.
I have had a play around with it, need to get some new