The SharpDevelop repository now contains a sample application that shows how to use our libraries ICSharpCode.SharpDevelop.Dom and ICSharpCode.TextEditor to enable code-completion.

You can find it in the folder SharpDevelop\samples\CSharpCodeCompletion. The expression resolver is part of SharpDevelop.Dom, so the example supports complex generic types etc. However it implements only code-completion when typing "." - no Ctrl+Space, keyword-completion or method insight. The code was kept as simple as possible, so multiple overloads are not filtered out, and there are no different icons for protected or internal members.

In the directory samples\NRefactoryExample you can find a new demo of our VB.NET/C# parser library.

It converts a code snippet into it's abstract syntax tree represntation (AST) which you can see and modify in the treeview below. The other way (AST to code) supported as well as running a visitor on the tree.

Supposed you want to call a method and don't know the return type you can use this handy completion feature:

int getSomeObscureType()
{
    return 1;
}      

void test()
{
    ? x = getSomeObscureType();
}

After you typed the semicolon (highlighted in red), the placeholder "?" is replaced by the return type of the called method:

void test()
{
    int x = getSomeObscureType();
}

Once again we are sitting in Bad Ischl discussing and working on SharpDevelop.


Chris showing off his brand new machine.


Daniel, after optimizing the folding speed.

Read the detailed announcement for version 2.1's Beta 1 release here.

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).