farbot.com

The .NET initiative from Microsoft has gained a lot of traction, and the open source world is paying attention for a few good reasons.

Microsoft open-sourced the C# language definition, even though a good chunk of the libraries you use in their development tools -- such as those related to the windows user interface -- aren't open source. This means that enterprising coders in the Mono project have been able to implement the open spec, then reverse-engineer the rest of the libraries.

Microsoft also does give you a basic compiler and a few minor, free tools as part of the .NET SDK, but if you want the full-featured integrated development environment (known as an IDE to you and me), you want to buy the Visual Studio.NET software. That's pricey stuff.

So an open source project showed up to develop a free IDE. It's called SharpDevelop, and they've just celebrated the release of version 2.0 of their software.

Here is the story, and here is a feature-by-feature comparison with VS.NET.