News Forge has a side by side comparison of KDevelop and Microsoft Visual Studio .Net. The article compares general application capabilities in the areas of UI, editing, compiling, frameworks, integration, and documentation. As would be expected by anyone familiar with the two, KDE/Qt thumps .Net in framework, UI, RAD design, and overall flexibility. The author also does a good job of noting some of the places Kdevelop is lacking. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
I found KDevelop is much better than I had expected before I started to actually work (as opposed to just play around) with it. KDevelop is more feature-rich than Microsoft’s product — and we’re talking actually useful things here — more flexible, and better integrated with different programming languages, frameworks, and third-party applications, and it has a less clunky user interface than the commercial contender.
And if Visual Studio existed as a native Linux application? I’d still rather use Kdevelop.
Qt, as far as its functionality, clarity and ease of use are concerned, can run circles around MFC without breaking a sweat, and similar can be said about GTK+. DotNet’s Windows Forms framework is a bit better than MFC, but still lags far behind Qt.
Overall, it was a very good review. The author brushes over autoconfig, probably the single hardest part of getting used to developing on Linux. If you are coming from a Windows world, the transition to autoconfig can be pretty difficult at first. The payoffs are distributed application building, multi-platform development (i.e. applications builds for hand-helds, desktops, and mainframes; all in the same source), and multi-application build logic.
If you have not had the opportunity to try Kdevelop and KDE/Qt I suggest you try out Knoppix a full featured KDE/Linux operating system on CD. Simply boot to the CD and run Linux. No install necessary. When you are done, you can remove the CD and boot back into your safe Windows environment. Knoppix will even access your Windows partitions, letting you save files to harddrive.