First beta of SharpDevelop 4

Almost two years after releasing their first prototypes, the SharpDevelop team have presented a first beta of version 4.0 of their open source integrated development environment (IDE). SharpDevelop can be used for creating .NET and Mono programs in the C#, Visual Basic, Boo, IronPython, F# and IronRuby programming languages.

The new release, code named "Mirador", is based on version 4.0 of the .NET Framework, which was released in April 2010. The workbench has been rewritten to use the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) instead of Windows Forms. The same applies to the AvalonEdit text editor, which is based on the WPF from Visual Studio 2010. Items on the roadmap for the final release include refactoring functions, Visual Basic .NET 10 support, code quality analysis features and the WPF Designer. All of these are being developed as part of Google's "Summer of Code" initiative.

As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

The first beta requires version 3.5 of the .NET framework. The developers also recommend using the Windows SDK. According to their announcement, a second beta is scheduled for the end of July. The latest stable release is version 3.2 from from early May. SharpDevelop is licensed under the GNU LGPL 2.1.

See also:

• SharpDevelop 3.2, now with IronRuby support, a report from The H.

(crve)