Dissecting a C# Application: Inside SharpDevelop

SharpDevelop is a complete Integrated Development Environment, written in C#. It includes all the advanced features that programmers expect from a modern IDE and, of course, implementing these features has required some advanced programming techniques.

The developers who created SharpDevelop give you an inside track on application development with a guided tour of the sourcecode for SharpDevelop. They will show you the most important code features and explain how you can use these techniques in your own projects. You will gain valuable experience of building an application on this scale, learning from the decisions, mistakes, problems and solutions that lead to the current version on SharpDevelop.

The SharpDevelop team will show you how to:

Build a highly modular application
Provide a flexible, extendable, customizable user interface
Manage the efforts of translators for effcient internationalization
Represent and manipulate text efficiently
Code search and replace functionality
Construct reusable controls
Implement a parser to provide syntax highlightingauto-completion as users type
Use reflection to access information about .NET classes
Create a Windows Forms designer
Generate code programmatically

All of these techniques are shown in the context of the source of the SharpDevelop application - a real piece of software that you can download and user yourself. This means that there are no 'toy' examples or theory that will not work in practice - just solid, real-world code and frank discussions of how it was created.