Ward Cunningham leaves Microsoft to work for The Eclipse Foundation. Wow.
Eclipse is hot nowadays. With BEA, Borland, CA, HP, IBM, Intel, Nokia, SAP, Sybase etc behind it, Eclipse is becoming "the development platform" for modern programming. And what's interesting - Eclipse is fully driven by corporate vendors, ISVs, start-ups and individual hackers extending and improving the Eclipse platform, which is of course open-source. Eclipse was designed to be community driven and this time it seems to be working.
IBM's Java IDE I'm working with when I do Java is of course just Eclipse with a bunch of plugins from IBM and this is the best Java IDE I ever seen.
Be Eclipse and Visual Studio competitors I'm not sure I would bet on Visual Studio. But actually Visual Studio users benefit from Eclipse too! I believe the raise of Eclipse was the main reason why Microsoft introduced express SKUs and made the VSIP program (Visual Studio extensibility API, now Visual Studio SDK) free for everyone. Now it sounds ridiculous, but just couple years ago one had to pay $10K/year to Microsoft just to be able to write a tool based on Visual Studio. Now everybody can do it for free and you'll see more and more Visual Studio based third-party tools.
Unfortunately Visual Studio is not open source, poorly documented and is based on old weird legacy layered in a complicated way code, mosty COM with more and more C# via interop so extending Visual Studio is still not easy. The next next next version of Visual Studio codenamed Hawaii being probably the complete redesign is only our hope for better Visual Studio.
We recorded an interview with Ward Cunningham that's now playing. Use this link:
http://www.sqlsummit.com/People/WCunningham.htm
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In a 20-minute MP3 interview, Ward Cunningham of the Eclipse Foundation and the father of wiki, discusses social software and global collaboration. He advocates extreme programming and agile development and believes Eclipse is mastering in a big way what wiki mastered in a small way.
Enter MonoDevelop. Give it time, and expect nothing but pure hacking joy ;)
okay, I'm not an IDE guy, I'm one of those guys who thinks emacs is cool but I have used both Eclipse and Visual Studio and really... Eclipse sucks. It is a memory hog with an irritating interface, there's a big load of things that plug into it and damn but there's a good chance that what will work with one version of eclipse won't work with the next minor update.
As an emacs guy I don't like VS either, but at least it will respond with a reasonable speed.
I think it would be easier to code C# on Eclipse in Future than hoping for a complete Redesign of Visual Studio :D
Oh, I'm so jealous of those Java-Developers, there is a biiig bunch of cool tools and components (especially XML-things and everything from Apache)