Visual Studio vs. Eclipse

My professional career starts with Java. It has been long time I detached from Java. In fact all of large scale project build by Java or C++. I was familiar with java from my second semester so it becomes quite a long time that I am in this arena. I used Kawa and JBuilder as Development IDE but never eclipse. In fact eclipse is much newer and by this time I become habituated with JBuilder. Last two years I was rambling in Microsoft Arena and detached from Java.

Today, I installed eclipse for an open source java project. As I never use eclipse I thought, why not try this project with eclipse as I heard a lot about eclipse. I knew that it got a tremendous pluggable architecture but what I didn’t know was it’s extend. I installed eclipse classic that comes with few plug-ins (thanks God!!!) but when I opened the IDE and started a project I was really shocked. The number of initial plug-ins is too few to start. Actually anybody comes from Microsoft’s arena will be shocked. Microsoft build their product from dumb people and if start using them, eventually you become dumb as well. You need to know too little to work in Microsoft environment whereas you need to know a lot to work in such environments.

If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.

- Linus Torvalds

So there no wonder that I became dumb over the time and it takes me three hours to open a java file in design mode… lolz… Probably this is a common problem for those who come from Microsoft Visual studio. The most interesting things there is lot of plug-in for the same purpose even when I start downloading them there are lot of mirror sites for the same content :P.

Visual Studio is too friendly and it prepares everything for you whereas in eclipse you have to prepare everything for yourself. It will provide nothing and you have to choose the right one from millions. So life is not easy here for the beginner at the very first time. Anyway you have to struggle initially but surely you will love it over the time.