Shine Draw

An Open Source, feature-rich and professional RIA application development environment for Microsoft Silverlight in Eclipse.

Eclipse4SL has been out for a couple of months since the release of Silverlight 2. However, I didn’t do any testing on this tool until yesterday. I have a lot of findings and let’s see it one by one.

Installation

If you are currently doing Silverlight Development using Visual Studio, that will be great. You only have to download the latest version of Eclipse and install the plug-in on the fly. The complete installation guide can be found via http://www.eclipse4sl.org/download/.

Please note that if you are using Eclipse 3.3 or previous version, you will encounter plug-in missing error during the installation. Don’t attempt to solve it, just go to grab the latest version will save your time!

Eclipse Tools

Once you have completed the installation, go to the top menu and select File->New->Other->Silverlight Project. Then you will see something like this.

Generally, you will have all the basic tools you needed for development. They are namely Project Explorer, Control List, XML Editor, Application Preview, Coding Tool, etc.

There is no code suggestion?

The next thing I attempt to try is the code editor. It has syntax highlight, auto formatting. Oh, but where is the code suggestion?

Well, I am not C# expert, I give up coding immediately.

(No code suggestion for XAML editor as well.)

Debugging Tool

There is no debugging tool. That’s all.

Compatibility with Visual Studio

When I move to the Project Folder, I found that it contains a .csproj file. That’s what I anticipated. I can open the project by Silverlight and move on my development.

Let’s try the reverse order. I attempt to move my ColorPicker Sample into the Eclipse Workspace. A new Eclipse Silverlight Project is created successfully. However, when I run the application, nothing shows up.

I think the problem is probably caused by encoding problem of the files. After certain copy and past procedures, I can finally compile it!

However, I believe if your project is complicated, you will definitely have a lot of troubles.

Summary

Frankly speaking, it’s not fair to compare such a new plug-in with Visual Studio (which exists for years). However, I think this plug-in still has a lot of rooms for improvement before it can be adopted by the developers.

This is just the beginning, I believe it will continue to evolve and become much more powerful.

Shares and Enjoy~

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