Question

I find BlueJ a great tool for plotting a program before diving in and I was wondering if there is a similar tool for C#?

Answer 1

I certainly don’t know of any, and I’d be fairly confident in an outright no – at least at this stage.

However, I’m curious as to why you’re so dead set on having one for C# and not Java? BlueJ is designed for beginners to get them into a good OO mindset from the word go, and that it does very well. It’s not an IDE you stick with for years at all, it’s there to get you started in the best way possible.

With that in mind, if you are just getting started then there’s no harm in getting started in Java rather than C# – the switch to C# after doing Java for a while should be pretty easy, and a lot of the skills that you learn with Java – both on the OO front and syntactically (beacuse of the languages’ similarities!) will also apply to C#. I mainly use Java, and just remember a few key differences about C# – when those are in my head I can happily swap between the two.

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2008/06/26/bluej-interview.html shows the following:

Q: Is there an equivalent project using C# as a base language or Eclipse as a base IDE?

[MK] Not that I know of. I have seen a couple of projects like that over the years, one for C#, and another one as an Eclipse plugin for Java, but they seem to have died again, from what I can see. I am not sure why they didn’t really take off. I guess one challenge for small or community-driven projects is to provide the stability and professional-level support that we are doing for BlueJ.

I am actually quite surprised about this. When we started, I thought we’d have a head start of a couple of years maybe, and then Microsoft would bring out their own equivalent system and muscle us out of the market. As it turns out, Microsoft have copied some of the core concepts from BlueJ for Visual Studio, but they were late — they only did this a couple of years ago — and then they stuffed it all up by excluding this functionality from their free, entry-level version of their system. They just don’t get it.