Review: X-develop

X-develop Professional 1.0 beta build 131, Free while in beta
Omnicore Software
Karlsruhe, Germany
+49 (0) 721 9375840
http://www.omnicore.com/index.jsp

Now that it's clear to many developers that Visual Studio Team System isn't an option for their .NET development due to the new pricing structure, I expect renewed interest in alternative .NET IDEs. This couldn't come at a better time for Omnicore, because their new cross-platform, cross-language IDE X-Develop is just entering its full-blown open beta, and it looks pretty darned impressive at first glance. While pricing hasn't been announced yet, their previous Java IDE was in the $300 range, so I think we can expect this one to be reasonable as well. And although it doesn't offer everything for every .NET developer (you won't, for example, find a visual forms designer here) it does have some very nice features for the hardcore code slinger that make it worth a good look.

First off, this is a fast IDE. Not only does it feel peppy to work with from mouse and keyboard, but it's doing plenty of work behind the scenes to make you feel faster. Apparently there's some sort of continuous code-parsing engine at work here. Not only does X-develop know at all times where the errors are in your code, it's got another pane where you can look at some best practices inspection results - things like whether you have methods that can't be reached from the application's entry points. Another nice touch is the ability to click an icon next to a member name and see a list of all the methods that override the current method; click on the list and you hop right to the override. There's similar hyperlinking back in the other direction.

X-develop runs on both Windows an Linux, and it can handle .NET (including Mono) and Java development. It features a batch of refactoring features (I had more success with these in C# code than VB.NET, but they may just not be fully hooked up in the current beta), integration with source code control systems including CVS, VSS, Subversion and BitKeeper, and a really excellent set of navigation tools; it's trivial to quickly find any symbol or class knowing its name. It's also good at helping you write code. Code formatting can be set up in relatively fine-grained options, you get code completion, helpers for implementing interfaces, creating getters and setters and constructors, and so on.

If you're already using VS.NET, it's pretty darned easy to give X-develop a try as well. It can use VS .NET 2003 or 2005 solution and project files, and it can use MSBuild for its own compilation step. It also supports VS2005 project and item templates. This also opens up the possibility of using X-develop as your everyday IDE and switching to VS when you need to do form design, I suppose - though I personally have never been a fan of trying to use two IDEs. I have enough trouble trying to remember the productivity features in one.

The current beta is limited to 20 days, and it's free. It's polished enough to be usable for real code, and if you're in the mood to shop around, I'd say add it to the cart. Particularly if your coding leans more towards classes and less towards databases and user interface, this could be the IDE for you.

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.