Evans praises Microsoft's tool quality, stating that Visual Studio has "for many years... dominated the development tool scene, both because of the huge installed base of Windows, but also because of the world-class quality that Microsoft devotes to its tools."
"Microsoft has always recognized the strategic importance of developers, and has spent significant resources on producing excellent development tools," Evans continued, adding that "Visual Studio .NET is no exception."
The study focused on the top 11 most-used IDEs, which, according to Evans, are (in alphabetical order): Adobe/Macromedia Studio 8, Borland Delphi, Borland JBuilder, Eclipse, IBM Rational App Developer, IBM WebSphere Studio, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, NetBeans, Oracle JDeveloper, Sun Java Studio, and Sybase PowerBuilder.
Visual Studio was used by 31.7 percent of the survey's respondents. The next two most-used IDEs were found to be Adobe's Studio 8 (acquired through its acquisition of Macromedia), at 11.8 percent, followed closely by the open-source Eclipse tools framework, at 11.2 percent.
Participants in the survey rated each of the top 11 IDEs in terms of a list of features that included:
- Compiler/Interpreter
- Debugger
- Editor
- Make/Build Functions
- Documentation
- Application Modeling Tools
- Web Design Tools
- Sample Applications
- Profiler
- Compiler Performance
- Performance of Resulting Applications
- Ease of Use
- Ability to Integrate 3rd Party Tools
- Availability of 3rd Party Tools
- Quality of Technical Support Options
- Size and Quality of Developer Community
In "overall rankings," which formed a composite based on the above list of features, Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE came in second, behind IBM's Rational Application Developer. Both top-11 open source IDEs (NetBeans and Eclipse), meanwhile, received the lowest scores among the group. However, Evans suggested that the open-source nature of these IDEs is likely to result in substantial gains in future surveys.
Further details on the survey, "Developers' Choice -- IDE Scorecard -- Definitive Rankings of the Top 11 IDEs by Over 1,200 Developers," are available from Evans's website,
here. An executive summary in PDF format is available for free download with registration, and the full survey is available for purchase.
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