Visual Studio is a very powerful and popular development environment from Microsoft. Amethyst 2 is adding Flash and Flex authoring capabilities to it. It seems to have some very interesting features, taking avantage of Visual Studio’s rich feature set. It’s making it an interesting alternative to Eclipse.
• IntelliSense
• Drill-down debugger
• Code Refactoring
• Customizable Code Formatting
• Auto-expanding Snippets
• Drag-and-Drop application design
• Align controls to ‘alignment bars’
• Align controls to a customizable grid
• Round-tripping between the Designer and Code Editor
• Import/Convert Wizard for existing Flex or Flash Builder projects
• Share code with the Flash IDE to edit and debug Flash projects with Amethyst
More information on their full feature list.
It would be interesting to see how it compares to FDT, a Flash/Flex authoring Eclipse plugin that has been around for many years.
More information on amethyst 2 on SapphireSteel Software’s blog.
You could also try comparing it to IntelliJ IDEA, and find Amethyst rather unimpressive.
ndcollins Oh true, i forgot they also have support. Would be great to see a feature by feature comparison though.
Jens Loeffler ndcollins Well, think of it this way.. every bit as powerful as Visual Studio is AFTER you add Resharper 🙂