A rather informal launch as I am here in Barcelona at TechEd Developers - John (SharpZipLib maintainer) has released v0.85 for both .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0:

• Compiled for .NET 1.1
• Compiled for .NET 2.0
• The Samples & The Source

The SharpZipLib download page doesn't yet reflect the new version, so this is the place to get the version first!

Because we shipped a non-working version of SharpReport with build 2.1.0.2006, we have released build 2.1.0.2017 (Beta 2b) for those of you that test SharpReport inside SharpDevelop. The upshot: you now have the latest and greatest bits of SharpReport in SharpDevelop2 2.1 Beta 2. Download

Please see the Beta 2 Announcement for details of what's new, changed, enhanced, fixed or even removed from the bits.

In the blog entry SharpDevelop Presentation we announced our plans to reverse-integrate SharpReport in the future. This has happened as of today's Beta 2 launch of SharpDevelop.

The SharpReport Repository

SharpReport has a repository of its own now: svn://sharpdevelop.net/sharpreport/trunk

The checkout procedures are explained in this Wiki entry.

Building SharpReport

After checkout, run debugbuild.bat:

This will populate the bin folder with the SharpReport standalone designer plus the SharpReport addin:

Simply execute SharpDevelop.SharpReport.exe and you will be presented with the familiar SharpDevelop IDE, however, slimmed down to support SharpReport-needed functionality only:

(Please note that as of this writing, the SharpReport samples haven't yet been checked in to the new repository)

Where Do I Get Support?

SharpReport now has a dedicated support forum, and Peter will be blogging about SharpReport features here.

Where Can I Download Binaries?

At this point, there are no precompiled packages available other than SharpReport shipping in Beta 2 of SharpDevelop 2.1. Note, however, that Beta 2 is shipping an older version of SharpReport than is available via the repository because of reverse integration.

The PDF contains a presentation on SharpDevelop touching the following points:

• SharpDevelop - The IDE
• SharpDevelop - The Core
• SharpDevelop - The Architecture
• SharpDevelop - The Components
• SharpDevelop - The Team
• SharpDevelop - The Future

The section "components" talks specifically about features of SharpDevelop that can be used in your applications.

sd2from10000ft.pdf (462.7 KB)

Daniel prepared an NRefactory Internals presentation for this year's #d^3 event in Bad Ischl. The PDF version is now available for download:

nrefactoryinternals.pdf (1.01 MB)

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.