In my search for the perfect (and free/cheap) obfuscator, I came across this list of totally bodacious .Net tools Microsoft has kindly listed on the MSDN site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/programming/tools/
One thing that caught my attention is the abundance of C# IDEs. I’ve played around with SharpDevelop before, but now there’s another one that’s appeared out of thin air called Antichinus.
To which I say, Why? Why all these IDEs? IDEs are not simple to make, and in my humble opinion you would have to be pretty creative to come up with something better than VS.Net 2005. Sure, it’s good to have lots of choices, but I’m forced to feel a little pain on behalf of these obviously skilled developers, who spent all that time making these pretty cool (but redundant) IDEs, only to have everyone… not really care.
Actually, I used to briefly care about SharpDevelop (way back a long time ago), enough to download it and give it a whirl, but it stalled during installation while attempting to create something called an Intellisense database (why this had to be done at install time, I’ll never know – does the .Net runtime change that often?). So I just uninstalled the sucker and never looked back. Maybe it’s better now! Maybe it’s a really cool IDE with… everything VS.Net Express has. For free.
Dude – I sound like the old curmudgeon himself. But it made for a good blog, now, didn’t it?
