A feature that was implemented rather early in the codebase of SharpDevelop2 2.1 is support for code analysis via FxCop. This code analysis tool comes in really handy to for example spot security problems in your code (discussed in the article A Look Inside the Security Development Lifecycle at Microsoft), or more general, detect coding errors (please see the article Bad Code? FxCop to the Rescue, or FxCop, Your .NET Cop).

How does it look like? It integrates with the build system and errors / warnings are displayed alongside compiler warnings:

FxCop is not enabled by default, you have to do that in the project options:

It is considered good coding practice to enable code analysis.

SharpDevelop2 2.1 codenamed "Serralongue" will ship with support for WiX (Windows Installer XML toolset) setup creation. Matt has a detailed blog post on the WiX integration, as well as one on the new setup for SharpDevelop2 2.1 that was built using the WiX feature set.

In other news: we are pleased to announce that we will ship Beta 1 of SharpDevelop2 2.1 "Serralongue" on Tuesday, September 19th.

SharpDevelop 2.1 sports code-completion support for .NET 1.0, .NET 1.1 and the Compact Framework 2.0. In the "Compiling" option page of the project, you can choose the target framework:

Now code-completion is supported for all frameworks except the Compact Framework 1.0. Note that choosing Compact Framework is a new option in SharpDevelop 2.1 - previously, you had to modify your project file manually. If you did this, you had to change your project file manually back into the default .NET 2.0 one and then choose "Compact Framework 2.0" in the options - code-completion is available only this way. If you want to create a new Compact Framework project, there now also is a Compact Framework project template.

Note that code-completion requires the target framework to be installed on your machine - otherwise you'll get the default .NET 2.0 completion. For the Compact Framework, the Compact Framework SDK must be installed.

Matt Ward (the feature owner) has put online a blog post on the new XPath Queries feature. Check it out and let Matt know what you think!

Note: this is a feature of SharpDevelop 2.1 "Serralongue", which at this time is only available directly from our source code repository.

SharpDevelop 2.1 "Serralongue" ships with the ability to be hosted in your application to provide IDE services for your users to extend / automate your application. Basically what we have done is split up SharpDevelop.exe into two assemblies, ICSharpCode.Sda.dll and SharpDevelop.exe, whereas the latter assembly only calls into the SDA API to bootstrap #develop itself.

To get an idea what you can do with SharpDevelop for Applications (SDA), I have created a screen recording of a walkthrough of the SdaUser sample that ships with Serralongue:

SharpDevelop for Applications demo (5.97MB)

Again, please note that Serralongue is currently only available via our Subversion repository.

SharpDevelop 2.1 code-named "Serralongue" will be shipping with list (object) data source support in SharpReport (#report). This list binding support comes in addition to binding to SQL-based data sources that was available previously. The following screen recording gives you a quick tour of the new list support and shipping samples for list data sources:

Video (3.98MB)

SharpDevelop 2.1 can be obtained only from the Subversion repository at this time. The samples shown in the demo video can be found in the samples\SharpReport directory (ReportSamples and ReportsFromList respectively).

It took the team quite some time, but SharpDevelop2 2.0 Final has finally landed! Now that the foundation has been laid, work on version 2.1 will be much smoother.

Matt just completed an all-new feature tour for SharpDevelop2. It covers the following topics:

• Creating Windows Applications
• Visually Designing Forms
• Code Completion
• Code Generation
• Refactoring
• XML Comments
• Code Navigation
• Debugging
• Converting Code between Languages
• Unit Testing
• Code Coverage
• Editing XML
• Targeting Different Frameworks
• Creating Boo Applications

Be sure to check it out!

The german article titled "Core - Extension architecture", published in the dotnet magazin 06/06, can now be freely obtained here:

Article [PDF
Demoproject and related files [ZIP]

After reading the article, you should be able to integrate the SharpDevelop Addin System in your own applications.

I just uploaded RC2 to SourceForge. This is the final release candidate before we ship SharpDevelop2 code-named "Corsavy". SharpDevelop2 works fine on Windows Vista as you can see in this screenshot:

This is not really surprising as every version of SharpDevelop ever shipped works with standard user privileges.