Evans Data Corp released a report ranking IDEs based on features and developer satisfaction.  Rational Application Developer For WebSphere (RADW aka WSAD) has the lead for the second year running over all other IDEs.  That’s good news, I guess.  And RADW is a slick environment for J2EE, with great debugging, support for all sorts of types of files and a robust support network.  That said, it seems that the real news in this report are the gains Visual Studio seems to be making.  Visual Studio .NET is night and day the best IDE Microsoft has ever put together.  It’s really tough for a company to compete with the entire open source community, but my feeling is that the momentum is strong for Visual Studio apps and developers.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see the top 2 flip-flop for next years report. 

In related news Microsoft launched a community building website for code sharing at CodePlex.com. Some see this as a reaction to the growing popularity of open source, but I’m not sure that the market isn’t mature.

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