It’s probably not fair to compare Microsoft Visual Studio to Eclipse. Visual Studio, for example, is a full fledged product from Microsoft that is supported and comes with a hefty price tag.  Eclipse, on the other hand, is an open source tool that is support by the community and is free for all to use.  The reason I think it’s fair to do some amount of comparison is because Eclipse gets positioned in the marketplace as a tool that can do all that Visual Studio can. So, they brought this on themselves.

I’ve been using Visual Studio for over 10 years. It has gone through several upgrades as the Microsoft programming languages and technologies have evolved from Visual Basic and C++ to C# and VB.NET. The tool is extremely stable.  I’m not using the current version - Visual Studio 2008 - and can’t recall it ever crashing or locking up. While most people think of Visual Studio as only being used for Microsoft programming languages, Visual Studio is an extensible tool. For example, you can do PHP programming in Visual Studio using VS.Php from jcxSoftware. Want to do Ruby programming? No problem, check out Ruby in Steel.  In some cases there is an additional cost for the Visual Studio add-on, but in other cases it is free.  My point is that you can use a very stable, proven development tool like Visual Studio to do more than just Microsoft development.

My experience with Eclipse is limited compared to Visual Studio. I first started using Eclipse about a year ago when I expanded my horizons to develop with PHP.  I considered using VS.Php add-on to Visual Studio but confess that I was cheap and didn’t want to spend any money at the time since I wasn’t sure I’d stick with PHP. After doing a lot of searching and research I decided to go with Eclipse and use a free PHP plugin. Considering everything was free I must say it worked pretty good.  The Eclipse workspace was similar in structure to Visual Studio so the learning curve was minimal. The PHP programming was pretty good and included intellisense. There were some quirky things with auto formatting, but overall a good experience. As I started to use it more, however, I began to run into stability issues.  If I left Eclipse running for the day it would often end up crashing. I ended up installing the more recent version to see if that would help but it really didn’t.  Different issues, but still not as stable as Visual Studio.

There’s an old saying - “You get what you pay for” - and that holds true for Visual Studio and Eclipse.  If you want professional grade development then spend the money and stick with Visual Studio. If you’re looking for a decent, free development environment then give Eclipse a look.

When it comes to developing web applications, web sites, plugins, and so on you need to ask yourself a very important question. Just how good does it need to be? The question is intended to be for the initial release. In other words, at what point is the thing your working on good enough to be released or published?

I find myself frequently in a state of analysis-paralysis. I keep thinking about how to do something the right/perfect way, and in the end I never find time to actually get starting building it. It happens when I’m thinking about creating a web site, but also something as simple as posting to some of my blogs. There’s a fine line here.  I don’t want to publish something that’s junk and will hurt my reputation or the site’s reputation, but at the same time if I wait too long or spend so much time getting it perfect I lose out on potential traffic and revenue.

Whether you are a pure developer (i.e., all you do is develop) or a person like me that does some marketing on the Internet and does his own development too, you really need to think about the criteria for release 1 of what you’re doing. The point is that you can always have subsequent releases that improve upon the initial release. Updating a web site, blog post, plugin, etc. is so much easier on the Internet. Take a look at the apps the Google has developed. All of them are still considered "Beta".  The idea is that they are never really "done", but rather in a continuous state of evolution.  I think that’s a great way to think about not only software but also our marketing and sales efforts on the Internet.