Hello Xian, I would have several suggestions:
First if your moving from Microsoft IDE to another IDE, you'll feel
you've been missing out for a long time because I'm *never* seen such a
bad product.
First issue is cost, and I would recommend you pay for your IDE!
Although I'm a huge fan of the open source movement and a massive
contributor, when it comes to being a 'user' of open source projects,
I'm often dissapointed. They seem to offer a million and one feature,
but often they are just half completed and everything seems
inconsistant from plugin to plugin.
A small fee (<$200) will pay for itself over time in productivity!
Second issue is buzz words! Don't go for any IDE which promise to
support stuff like UML and object modeling and are made for
'Architects' and this and that. A great IDE will consentrate on
'development' issues, such as 'auto code-generation', 'code
beautifyer', 'code-completion', 'code refactoring' (important),
run-time 'code-analysis'. Will allow you to organize your code
efficiently. Anything which will help you in writting code is a plus,
anything else is just a selling point (but consider them as a second
option).
An IDE can't be everything! Your architect will probably want to use
his own tools, the designer another tool and you, well your going to
code it, so who cares about seeing nice little graphs and boxes about
your objects and classes.
Third issues is 'plugins'! If they have a great plugin support (both
binary and API), you will have the option of installing and using
everything I told you not to consider in the paragraph above. Whats
the difference you ask? Well instead of the IDE company concentrating
on all of these little plugin tools, others do. So the IDE company
spends their time and energy on what matters... the IDE! And not on
architecture modules and UML modelers, etc., etc.
Thats it! So which IDE do I use? Well that would be IntelliJ IDEA.
Why? Because of its great refactoring tools, it's speed, cost and
last, plugin API (I code my own).
The 'personal' edition is only a hundred dollars or so (reasonable).
Hope this helps.
Jeach! (
www.jeach.com)