Is Visual .Net worth it?

[Trevor]

I am just learning c# and I have a book entitled "Programming c#"
O'Reilly. It strongly recommends Visual .Net.

Can anyone enlighten me on their experiences of SDK versus Visual
..Net?

 

[Miha Markic]

Hi Trevor,

SDK is a bunch of mostly command line utilities, docs and samples/tutorials.
While VS.NET is an IDE. Actually, a greate one.
You'll certainly want to use the IDE for program development.

 

[codymanix]

You can also use SharpDevelop. It is an open source IDE and programmed in C#
too!

 

[Frank Oquendo]

You can also use SharpDevelop. It is an open source IDE and
programmed in C# too!

I tried my hardest to like SharpDevelop. It just isn't far enough along
to compete with Visual Studio .NET, especially when you consider that a
single-language vresion of the product will only run you $99.

--
There are 10 kinds of people. Those who understand binary and those who
don't.

http://code.acadx.com
(Pull the pin to reply)

 

[Rob Teixeira [MVP]]

VS will save you MANY MANY MANY hours of frustration and debugging.
The SDK is just the docs, framework, samples, a few tools, and compilers.
Everything is command-line driven.
The VS IDE sets projects up for you, has incredible debugging facilities,
and even tells you many places where there may problems in code. The
designers for webforms and winforms project alone are worth the $100
admission price. And that doesn't even scratch the surface.

-Rob Teixeira [MVP]

 

[Bruno Jouhier [MVP]]

I doubt that you'll find many people who program directly around the SDK,
simply because Visual Studio gives you so much more productivity. If you are
used to old style development (SDK with emacs, vi, or even ed -- why not),
you should still try Visual Studio, and keep your good old tools for
occasional tasks that they do better than Studio (and as you learn Studio,
you'll use them less and less). For example, I still use emacs from time to
time because it works much faster with big files, and the macros are so
great, but I do 99.95% of the work with Studio.

Bruno.

 

[JDeats]

I doubt you'll find any business or organization that has adopted .NET
development without Visual Studio.NET. The truth of it is that the
..NET Framework languages were designed side-by-side with the Visual
Studio.NET team and in some areas changes were even made to the
language to help build a more effective Visual Studio product. To
really harness and appriciate the RAD capabilities of .NET you need an
IDE that takes advantages of what's there, and right now Visual
Studio.NET is the only one that's doing that.

Having said that, if you are a beginner I think it's better to work
with the raw materials, use the command-line utilities to compile, use
your choice of text editor. Learning all this will accomplish two
things: 1. You'll have an understanding of what's going on under the
hood of VS.NET and 2. You'll have a much greater appriciation of what
the VS.NET IDE is doing for you.

 

[Trevor]

I tried my hardest to like SharpDevelop. It just isn't far enough along
to compete with Visual Studio .NET, especially when you consider that a
single-language vresion of the product will only run you $99.

I have now ordered Visual C# Net.

 

[Bob X]

"Frank Oquendo" <[email protected]> wrote in message

I have now ordered Visual C# Net.

Aren't the single language versions "hobbled" in slight ways?

 

[Dave Veeneman]

The Server Explorer has limited functionality in the single language
versions. You can't do database design the way you can in the regular
version.