.NET development is typically done within a graphical IDE, eg. Visual Studio. If you want to do development on Linux or OS X, you can use MonoDevelop, an awesome cross-platform IDE.
That’s cool, but I prefer doing development from the terminal. That’s the environment that I love.
With Rails, if you want to make a new project, you just run rails new MyProjectName from the command-line. When I got back into .NET, I found myself really missing that experience. Having to launch an IDE (or edit lots of XML by hand) just to do something simple like generate a project or add a DLL reference seems really silly to me.
Introducing CLIDE
So … I made a CLI “IDE” for .NET. It’s currently just a tool for creating and maintaining .NET projects and solutions.
Reasons why you might want to use CLIDE:
- You want to write .NET applications without an IDE like Visual Studio / MonoDevelop
- You want to be able to easily script the creation/modification of .NET projects (eg. on your CI/build server)
- You saw me use it in another .NET screencast and were wondering “WTF is this
clidecommand he’s using?” - Eventually: cross-platform NuGet package support (this is why I originally started making clide)
Installing
In the screencast, I note that clide is available as a NuGet package but it kindof defeats the purpose of clide if you need Visual Studio to install it!
For now, you can also get the latest clide.exe directly from the CLIDE GitHub page.
That’s all!
Enjoy! Let me know if you might find CLIDE useful and have feature requests, etc. It’s very Beta right now, but I use it for all of my .NET development.