[Update 31/07/2005 19:08: Fixed the name of the boo bindings for #Develop' author, sorry for the mixup.]

I'm getting sick of SharpDevelop, it can't handle even basic IDE stuff correctly. I'm not talking about rocket science here, I'm talking about basic functionality like moving files from one folder to the other, adding a folder and renaming it, drag & drop of project files to open the project and not the file's text etc.

The single saving grace for #Develop is that it has boo integration, which mean that I can get IntelliSense that mostly work. But when I need to quit the IDE and modify by hand the project file every time I want to add a directory... that is more than enough. I tested #Develop several times in the past. My final conclusion is that about the only mature part of this software is the text editor (and even that is missing basic functionality like word wrapping [notepad has it, for crying out loud]). It has gotten to the point where I currently can't compile Brail using SharpDevelop while it compiles cleanly using NAnt (and no, I didn't had things in NAnt that I didn't have in #Develop)!

I was chatting with a friend and he sent me this screen shot from XDevelop, check out their site, the demo in their site looks very good:

Do you the little green vees? Those are passing tests, and there are plenty more functionality where this came from (refactoring, code browsing, etc).

This is not freeware, and it doesn't support Boo, so I'm going to pass on it for now (although not forever!) and see what JetBrains has to offer with their .Net 2.0 IDE.  Daniel Grunwald wrote the boo integration for #Develop. Arron has started a similar project for VS.Net (which is now on hold because of the VS Extensibility team stupidity) and he has plans to write an integration package for Boo. I already talked with JetBrains and they stated that not only will the IDE be open for extensibility, but you would get all the goodies regardless of the langauge. This is something that I would have too see to believe, but it's certainly better than what #Develop offers.

Currently I'm digging into jEdit with Boo syntax coloring and some nice plugins, here is my current work:

Notice that the syntax for Boo is nearly identical for the one used by VS.Net for C#. Do you see at the bottom the bulid script? Propertly syntaxed? It's not an IDE, but it's close enough, and it's certainly more stable than #Develop