MonoDevelop

Since my last blog post about MonoDevelop on Windows, things have improved a lot. I focused my work in making MD good enough to be used for everyday MD hacking. We are still not there, but close. Here are some improvements done in the past week:Fixed ... [More] the GTK# designer add-in. It is now fully working.Implemented a new backend for the Subversion add-in. I tried using the add-in we have for Linux, but the libraries I could find for Win32 have some differences in the API and the bindings doesn't work. I finally decided to refactor a bit the SVN add-in to support different backends, and implemented a new one based on SharpSvn. So the SVN add-in is also fully working.Added support for debugging, based on the debugger that comes with .NET. This is still work in progress, although most of features already work: stepping, breakpoints, inspecting variables with drill down and evaluation of expressions.Support for .NET 4.0. This new version can now be selected in the project properties.Improved the look of the main window. Reduced some spacing, improved the rendering of the tabs when docking several pads together, and other cosmetic fixes.Improved the performance of the text editor. It now feels more responsive.... and many other fixes.There are still some stability issues, and are several add-ins are still untested, but MD is starting to look great on Windows. GTK+ with the Vista theme looks really nice. Here are some screenshots of the GTK# designer and the debugger:Now, here is what you've been waiting for: a MonoDevelop installer for Windows. You can get it from the Windows Preview page in the MD site. Read carefully the instructions in that page. You'll have to install the latest GTK# package, also linked in that page. Also, beware that this is a preview built from trunk, so you can expect to find stability issues. In any case, bug reports are always welcome. Enjoy! [Less]

Since my last blog post about MonoDevelop on Windows, things have improved a lot. I focused my work in making MD good enough to be used for everyday MD hacking. We are still not there, but close. Here are some improvements done in the past week: ... [More] Fixed the GTK# designer add-in. It is now fully working. Implemented a new backend for the Subversion add-in. I tried using the add-in we have for Linux, but the libraries I could find for Win32 have some differences in the API and the bindings doesn't work. I finally decided to refactor a bit the SVN add-in to support different backends, and implemented a new one based on SharpSvn. So the SVN add-in is also fully working. Added support for debugging, based on the debugger that comes with .NET. This is still work in progress, although most of features already work: stepping, breakpoints, inspecting variables with drill down and evaluation of expressions. Support for .NET 4.0. This new version can now be selected in the project properties. Improved the look of the main window. Reduced some spacing, improved the rendering of the tabs when docking several pads together, and other cosmetic fixes. Improved the performance of the text editor. It now feels more responsive. ... and many other fixes. There are still some stability issues, and are several add-ins are still untested, but MD is starting to look great on Windows. GTK+ with the Vista theme looks really nice. Here are some screenshots of the GTK# designer and the debugger:Now, here is what you've been waiting for: a MonoDevelop installer for Windows. You can get it from the Windows Preview page in the MD site. Read carefully the instructions in that page. You'll have to install the latest GTK# package, also linked in that page. Also, beware that this is a preview built from trunk, so you can expect to find stability issues. In any case, bug reports are always welcome. Enjoy! [Less]

Yesterday I made a screencast demonstrating Moonlight Development on Mac using MonoDevelop. Today, I bring you the same thing on Linux: read more

Yesterday I announced much-improved MonoDevelop preview builds for Mac, which include ASP.NET MVC support out-of-the-box. However, there was a little surprise in that build that I didn't mention — full support for building and running Silverlight ... [More] projects using a bundled copy of the Moonlight SDK. I created a screencast to show off how easy this makes it to develop Silverlight apps on the Mac: read more [Less]

Besides the efforts to make MonoDevelop play nice in MacOS X, we've also been doing progress in the Windows side. This is how it looks right now:What you see above is MonoDevelop running on Windows Vista using Microsoft.NET. A lot of effort has gone ... [More] into making it easy to build MonoDevelop. Mike Kestner has been working on an installer that provides the core libraries on which MD depends on (such as Mono.Addins), and I hope it will be soon available so that people can start using it. We've also fixed the MD project files, so now MD can be built by just opening the main solution in Visual Studio and clicking on build.A new feature I had to add to MD in order to properly support Windows, is support for multiple runtimes. Thanks to that feature it is possible to select in the IDE which runtime you want to use for building and running a solution. It can be done using a combo box in the toolbar:There is also a "Run With" menu which shows all runtimes, so you can run a specific project using a specific runtime. Notice that support for multiple runtimes is not specific to Windows, it is also supported in Linux. In this case, you can register several mono runtimes versions installed in different prefixes (I'll blog with more detail about that soon).The basic funcitonality already works in Windows: loading a project, building running. Other features still don't work, such as the gtk# designer, the nunit add-in or the Subversion add-in. I haven't yet tried none of the add-ins in 'extras'.I hope we'll be able to make a 2.2 release with a very decent Windows support. I'll keep posting and twittering updates. [Less]

Besides the efforts to make MonoDevelop play nice in MacOS X, we've also been doing progress in the Windows side. This is how it looks right now:What you see above is MonoDevelop running on Windows Vista using Microsoft.NET. A lot of effort has gone ... [More] into making it easy to build MonoDevelop. Mike Kestner has been working on an installer that provides the core libraries on which MD depends on (such as Mono.Addins), and I hope it will be soon available so that people can start using it. We've also fixed the MD project files, so now MD can be built by just opening the main solution in Visual Studio and clicking on build.A new feature I had to add to MD in order to properly support Windows, is support for multiple runtimes. Thanks to that feature it is possible to select in the IDE which runtime you want to use for building and running a solution. It can be done using a combo box in the toolbar:There is also a "Run With" menu which shows all runtimes, so you can run a specific project using a specific runtime. Notice that support for multiple runtimes is not specific to Windows, it is also supported in Linux. In this case, you can register several mono runtimes versions installed in different prefixes (I'll blog with more detail about that soon).The basic funcitonality already works in Windows: loading a project, building running. Other features still don't work, such as the gtk# designer, the nunit add-in or the Subversion add-in. I haven't yet tried none of the add-ins in 'extras'.I hope we'll be able to make a 2.2 release with a very decent Windows support. I'll keep posting and twittering updates. [Less]

Besides the efforts to make MonoDevelop play nice in MacOS X, we've also been doing progress in the Windows side. This is how it looks right now:What you see above is MonoDevelop running on Windows Vista using Microsoft.NET. A lot of effort has gone ... [More] into making it easy to build MonoDevelop. Mike Kestner has been working on an installer that provides the core libraries on which MD depends on (such as Mono.Addins), and I hope it will be soon available so that people can start using it. We've also fixed the MD project files, so now MD can be built by just opening the main solution in Visual Studio and clicking on build.A new feature I had to add to MD in order to properly support Windows, is support for multiple runtimes. Thanks to that feature it is possible to select in the IDE which runtime you want to use for building and running a solution. It can be done using a combo box in the toolbar:There is also a "Run With" menu which shows all runtimes, so you can run a specific project using a specific runtime. Notice that support for multiple runtimes is not specific to Windows, it is also supported in Linux. In this case, you can register several mono runtimes versions installed in different prefixes (I'll blog with more detail about that soon).The basic funcitonality already works in Windows: loading a project, building running. Other features still don't work, such as the gtk# designer, the nunit add-in or the Subversion add-in. I haven't yet tried none of the add-ins in 'extras'.I hope we'll be able to make a 2.2 release with a very decent Windows support. I'll keep posting and twittering updates. [Less]

Besides the efforts to make MonoDevelop play nice in MacOS X, we've also been doing progress in the Windows side. This is how it looks right now:What you see above is MonoDevelop running on Windows Vista using Microsoft.NET. A lot of effort has gone ... [More] into making it easy to build MonoDevelop. Mike Kestner has been working on an installer that provides the core libraries on which MD depends on (such as Mono.Addins), and I hope it will be soon available so that people can start using it. We've also fixed the MD project files, so now MD can be built by just opening the main solution in Visual Studio and clicking on build.A new feature I had to add to MD in order to properly support Windows, is support for multiple runtimes. Thanks to that feature it is possible to select in the IDE which runtime you want to use for building and running a solution. It can be done using a combo box in the toolbar:There is also a "Run With" menu which shows all runtimes, so you can run a specific project using a specific runtime. Notice that support for multiple runtimes is not specific to Windows, it is also supported in Linux. In this case, you can register several mono runtimes versions installed in different prefixes (I'll blog with more detail about that soon).The basic funcitonality already works in Windows: loading a project, building running. Other features still don't work, such as the gtk# designer, the nunit add-in or the Subversion add-in. I haven't yet tried none of the add-ins in 'extras'.I hope we'll be able to make a 2.2 release with a very decent Windows support. I'll keep posting and twittering updates. [Less]

The past few weeks I've been working on improving the MonoDevelop experience on the Mac, making it integrate better with the Mac experience. Along with ASP.NET MVC support and other soon-to be-announced excitement, I think this makes MonoDevelop much more interesting for Mac users. read more

After releasing a preview of the ASP.NET MVC MonoDevelop addin, I decided to try it on the Mac. Although the MonoDevelop 2.0 release on the Mac is still an alpha, it's a lot better on the Mac than 1.0 was. Other than a couple of GTK redraw issues ... [More] , the major remaining problems are mostly to do with lack of Mac integration, such as Ctrl-Click, top-level menu bar and Mac-like keyboard shortcuts. Making MonoDevelop completely supported on the Mac is one of our targets for MonoDevelop 2.2. I downloaded the Mono 2.4 Mac installer and Monodevelop 2.0 Mac installer (beware, alpha release) then followed exactly the same steps from my earlier Linux-based walkthrough, and apart from a couple of harmless warnings during installation of the addin, it worked flawlessly! Since none on the MD team is familiar with Macs, contributions from Mac users would be most welcome, including testing and feedback about how to make it feel more Mac-like. read more [Less]