SharpDevelop is a free alternative to Visual Studio, making it a tempting option for those who need more than what Visual Studio Express can offer but don’t want to pay the 800 to 11,900 USD that the other versions command. Unfortunately .NET’s rapid development pace has put them at a disadvantage.
One of the most significant challenges the SharpDevelop is supporting the Razor view engine. Razor practically didn’t exist two years ago, it just one of many view engines supported by ASP.NET MVC. But Microsoft’s commitment to the Razor engine has allowed them to successfully push the other 12 view engines out of the limelight. Razor is now a must-have for any IDE targeting .NET web developers.
SharpDevelop 4.2 focuses one two aspects of the MVC/Razor support story. For Razor itself there is syntax highlighting and HTML folding. Still missing is code completion, a feature that is supported for normal C# code files.
Controllers and Views can be created manually to be code generated using T4 templates. Since it is based on T4, developers can alter the templates to better suite their project and style.
