More IDE thoughts

Following on from my entry Don’t underestimate the value of a good debugger,,,

Aq said:

I’m not really following your conclusion here. Are you saying that your Mono development environment isn’t as good as Visual Studio (because it’s absent a debugger), which is what the article appears to imply for 90% of it? Or do you mean that IDEs aren’t necessary and your Mono development environment is as good as an “all-in-one” IDE like VS (as the last paragraph seems to suggest)?

Both.

My current Mono development environment is inferior to Visual Studio .NET because it’s missing an integrated debugger, but an IDE does not a coder make.

To me it’s an evolution of my programming skills. I learnt Delphi¹ and Perl² via an IDE. I started learning .NET via the SDK, but only really got to grips with it when I started using the IDE. Now I’m using Mono, I find I no longer need the IDE – I regarded it as essential, but now it’s just nice to have.

¹ Not that you have much choice with Delphi – you have to buy the IDE to get the compiler, so you may as well use it.

² Via ActiveState Komodo – and excellent multi-language IDE based on Mozilla. I relied on it for the integrated debugger whilst learning, but I have weaned myself off it now.