Alternatives to Visual Studio

As we have seen, in theory, we can do without Visual Studio, but in practice that is not a good idea. The work required compiling a big project, finding all the errors in the code and performing numerous other actions would simply take too much time without Visual Studio.

On the other hand, Visual Studio is not a free software developing environment (the full version). Many people cannot afford to buy the professional version (this is also true for small companies and some people engaged in programming).

This is why there are some alternatives to Visual Studio (except VS Express Edition), which are free and can handle the same tasks relatively well.

SharpDevelop

One alternative is SharpDevelop (#Develop). We can find it at the following Internet address: http://www.icsharpcode.NET/OpenSource/SD/. #Develop is an IDE for C# and is developed as an open-source project. It supports the majority of the functionalities offered in Visual Studio 2012 but also works in Linux and other operating systems. We will not review it in details but you should keep it in mind, in case you need a C# development environment and Visual Studio is not available.

MonoDevelop

MonoDevelop is an integrated software development environment for the .NET platform. It is completely free (open source) and can be downloaded at: http://monodevelop.com. With MonoDevelop, we can quickly and easily write fully functional desktop and ASP.NET applications for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It also enables programmers to easily transfer projects created in Visual Studio to the Mono platform and make them functional in other platforms.