SharpDevelop 2 vs Microsoft Visual Studio Express

For those who are thinking about whether you'd like to choose between SharpDevelop 2 and Microsoft Visual Studio Express Edition, here is a comparison table between those two.

Hope it's useful :)

Taken from here

Feature	SharpDevelop 2.1	Visual Studio Express Editions
Code auto-completion	Yes	Yes
Code syntax highlighting	Yes	Yes
Windows Forms Designer	Yes	Yes
Web Forms Designer	No	Provided with Visual Web Developer
Code Coverage	Yes	No
Unit Testing	Yes	No
Languages Supported	C#, VB.NET, Boo	C#, C++, VB.NET, J#
Help documentation	No	Yes
Plug-in support	Yes	No explicit support for plug-ins however third party plug-ins can work with the Express edition.
Insert PInvoke Signatures	Yes	No
Testing Regular Expressions	Yes	No
Class View	Yes	Yes
Solution Explorer	Yes	Yes
Project and Solution File Format	MSBuild	MSBuild
Web references	Yes	Yes
Refactorings	Rename	Rename, Extract Method
Go to definition	Yes	Yes
Find References	Yes	Yes
Code generation	Yes. Not as powerful as Visual Studio's Code Snippet Manager.	Yes
Object Browser	Yes	Yes
Database Explorer	Yes. Lacking support for many database providers.	Yes
Publishing	No	Yes
Data Sources View	No	Yes
Add Data Source Wizard	No	Yes
Document Outline View	No	Yes
Resources	Local only	Local and project
ActiveX Toolbox Items	Partial - need to generate .NET interop library	Yes
Integrated debugger	Yes	Yes
Targeting different .NET frameworks	Yes	No
Code Completion for different .NET frameworks	Yes	No
Reporting	Yes	Yes through the report viewer plug-in
Task List	Yes	Yes
Error List	Yes	Yes
Database Designer Tools	No	Yes
Code conversion	Yes	No
Integrated NAnt support	Yes	No
Integrated WiX support	Yes	No
Integrated FxCop support	Yes	No
Navigation History	Yes	Yes
XPath Queries	Yes	No
Incremental Search	Yes	Yes
XML documentation preview and generation	Yes	No

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Creating a Restore Point Using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and C#.NET

I have tried to find a way to create a restore point in Windows, but no matter how hard I tried, I just can't find the one using C#, one of my favourite language. Sigh, I have to make one on my own :P Windows has something called WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). It contains a huge classes and objects that allow programmers to do a lot of things, creating a restore point is just one of them.
Here is the source code to create a restore point in Windows:

ManagementScope oScope = new ManagementScope("\\\\localhost\\root\\default");
ManagementPath oPath = new ManagementPath("SystemRestore");
ObjectGetOptions oGetOp = new ObjectGetOptions();
ManagementClass oProcess = new ManagementClass(oScope,oPath,oGetOp);

ManagementBaseObject oInParams = oProcess.GetMethodParameters("CreateRestorePoint");
oInParams["Description"] = "My Restore Point";
oInParams["RestorePointType"] = 0;
oInParams["EventType"] = 100;

ManagementBaseObject oOutParams = oProcess.InvokeMethod("CreateRestorePoint", oInParams, null);

Hope this will be useful. Don't forget to add System.Management as a reference!

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Free C# Tools

Are you a C# programmer? I am. How much money did you spend to buy C# development tools? $100? $1000? OK, I'm happy to say that I spend none to it ;) Seriously, Microsoft gave us chances to develop C# applications without having to pay (of course you have to pay for the Windows, and by the way... it is not about piracy, so it is legal). While .NET Framework and the compiler are free to be distributed, programmers still need to buy Visual Studio.NET. But don't worry: Microsoft had released a version of Visual Studio that is totally free, even for commercial applications! And even better: you can try SharpDevelop, an open-source application that worked perfectly like Visual Studio.NET. Of course those two tools has several weaknesses... but hey, they are totally free! (I admit it, I'm crazy for free stuffs :P). Borland C# Builder could be one last alternatives since it has a personal edition (but no commercial application). So now it is up to you, free or pay?

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