Product Review: Eclipse vs. Visual Studio

I subsribed to Slashdot.org last month. Since then I have been enjoying those discussions. What is that latest hot discussion? Check the title and you know it.

However, it is hard to compare the two because not so many guys use and both well. For me, either of these is that familiar. If I have no choices but the two, I prefer Eclipse.

Why Eclipse win my heart? Important points are,

1. Totally open source. You do not need to pay. If you do not want to pay Microsoft, you have to use those Expresses.
2. So many plug ins. Up to now, I see no major companies create plug ins for Visual Studio. IBM, Oracle, Rad Hat are all Eclipse biased.
3. Big community. Even though there is no MSDN on Eclipse side, user base of Eclipse is rather large. So many languages host themselves in Eclipse so as to target most platforms so for a long period, I believe all languages would be integrated into the IDE one day.

However, we have to confess there is no silver bullet. Even Eclipse has a weak point that nobody can ignore that it must be extended using Java.

Sometimes, Visual Studio is still the only choice. The good news is that both side start to learn from each other.

Anyhow, you can read this article in order to gain more information about Eclipse and Visual Studio.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-eclipse-visualstudio/?ca=dgr-lnxw01Eclipse-VS