What is the best IDE/GUI for my .NET DSL?

Question

Hi folks,

As a learning exercise I'm building a basic scientific computation environment based on .NET. I'd like the GUI of the app to be much like matlab, in that I have an interactive window, an objects window and the facility to spawn visualisation windows. Intellisense in my command window would be very nice. It seems visual studio itself could almost be used in this manner, is this a viable option? Creating the visualisations within the VS environment seems like the only hurdle. What could I do here?

Eclipse is also an option I suppose but I'd prefer to stay totally with .NET if possible.

Any other suggestions?

Answer 1

You could take a look at MonoDevelop here to provide some help. It is open-source and one of the nicer IDEs.

You could also build something based on GEdit, as it is very pluggable.

Those are the two tools, plus the CLI that I use for .NET development, but I am entirely on Linux/Unix using the Mono tools.

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

I've just discovered VSlab. Its specific to F#, however its a good demonstration of what I would like to be able to do with my own DSL in terms of visualisation and an interactive editor.