MonoDevelop

I've recently been tweaking the ASP.NET completion, adding support for resolving valid children for a control. These can be properties, a property, or controls. More difficult was resolving the valid children for properties, but this is now done: ... [More] Unfortunately, there aren't actually any designer or parser attributes for limiting the children of a property, so in order to resolve the children, I assume it's a collection, and look for an Add method with a single parameter derived from Control. If this exists, I use its parameter to filter the types in the control completion list. It's an ugly hack, but it works perfectly for tables and wizards. In the worst case, MonoDevelop falls back to showing all controls. With this done, the ASP.NET completion is essentially feature-complete. read more [Less]

The main thing I've been working on for the upcoming MonoDevelop 2.0 release is ASP.NET code completion, and I'm pretty happy with its current state. Recently I've been "downporting" this code into base classes to make it easier to write XML ... [More] completion and HTML completion editor extensions. A while back I wrote a hybrid XML/ASP.NET/HTML parser, which I've been using in MonoDevelop for triggering ASP.NET code completion. The aims of this parser were to be extensible and to have good error recovery. This makes sharing code between XML-like completion extensions very easy — the completion triggering code and the path bar code are entirely shared between the editors. After moving the HTML code down to a common base class, I decided to expose this functionality for actual HTML files, rather than just ASP.NET, and wrote an HTML text editor extension to handle this. read more [Less]

All the basic ASP.NET code completion features I wanted to get into MonoDevelop are now essentially complete and working with the new code completion database subsystem that Mike Kruger has written to replace our old one. It handles controls ... [More] , directives and HTML, all of their attributes, and some attribute values, including some colourful and time-saving examples. read more [Less]

I've recently added simple vi modes emulation to MonoDevelop. It's been a relatively quick and easy hack, though I'm pretty sure I'm now running a deficit of free time. I'm not actually a vi user, but I've been hearing from several of our users that ... [More] they miss vi navigation and commands. While most editors (for example emacs) can be simulated to some extend through a keybinding theme, it's impossible to replicate even the simplest behaviours of vi this way. After seeing ViEmu, a successful vi emulation addin for Visual Studio, I realised that a vi mode in MonoDevelop would probably see a lot of use, and, as a challenge, decided to bootstrap it. I'm hoping that real vi/vim users will contribute tweaks and patches to bring it closer to a faithful vi experience. read more [Less]

Since my girlfriend wants to learn English and I'll probably have to attend a meeting in Boston, we decided to put it all together and we are planning to stay a couple of months in Boston, from end October to end December. After 5 years working alone ... [More] at home, it will be refreshing to work in an office together with non-virtual coworkers. It also comes at a good timing because we are planning to release MonoDevelop 2.0 around the end of the year.This is going to be an interesting end of year.BTW, I'm currently looking for a small apartment (or big room) to rent, ideally around Cambridge. Unfortunately I'm not having much success, since apartments I found are either too expensive, or not available for those two months. So if you know about some good place, information will he highly appreciated! (mail lluis at novell dot com). [Less]

Since my girlfriend wants to learn English and I'll probably have to attend a meeting in Boston, we decided to put it all together and we are planning to stay a couple of months in Boston, from end October to end December. After 5 years working alone ... [More] at home, it will be refreshing to work in an office together with non-virtual coworkers. It also comes at a good timing because we are planning to release MonoDevelop 2.0 around the end of the year.This is going to be an interesting end of year.BTW, I'm currently looking for a small apartment (or big room) to rent, ideally around Cambridge. Unfortunately I'm not having much success, since apartments I found are either too expensive, or not available for those two months. So if you know about some good place, information will he highly appreciated! (mail lluis at novell dot com). [Less]

Since my girlfriend wants to learn English and I'll probably have to attend a meeting in Boston, we decided to put it all together and we are planning to stay a couple of months in Boston, from end October to end December. After 5 years working alone ... [More] at home, it will be refreshing to work in an office together with non-virtual coworkers. It also comes at a good timing because we are planning to release MonoDevelop 2.0 around the end of the year.This is going to be an interesting end of year.BTW, I'm currently looking for a small apartment (or big room) to rent, ideally around Cambridge. Unfortunately I'm not having much success, since apartments I found are either too expensive, or not available for those two months. So if you know about some good place, information will he highly appreciated! (mail lluis at novell dot com). [Less]

I'm very pleased that Visual Web Developer Express 2008 has now gained Web Application project support in Service Pack 1. This means that MonoDevelop users will be able to share ASP.NET projects with VWD developers. For those of you who haven't heard ... [More] the story behind this, Web Application projects are support for developing your ASP.NET site as a project. Although VS.NET and VS.NET 2003 did this, it was removed in VS 2005 in favour of "Web Sites", which consider a web site to be a directory. As I'm sure you can guess, the latter system is convenient for editing websites in-place — and they even had FTP support for this purpose — but in my opinion it's a poor system for well-structured development. Clearly other people thought so, because Web Applications were added back to Visual Studio 2005 as an optional addon, and included in VS 2008. Finally in VS2008 SP1, it's reached the free version. The reason for this is quite simple; it's a necessity for proper ASP.NET MVC development. At the moment, MD trunk does a passable job of opening projects from VWD 2008 SP1, but building and deployment isn't so great, because when I originally implemented these, I had to work around some of the limitations in MD's build and deployment system. These workarounds aren't quite compatible with the MSBuild projects from VS. I'm currently trying to make this seamless by tweaking our MSBuild loader to more closely match the MSBuild build targets and file copy semantics, making the MD deployment system slightly more generic, and implementing the build and deployment targets "correctly" for ASP.NET projects. Support for importing Web Sites may come later, but for now, it's good to see that we can now interoperate with Microsoft's free ASP.NET development tool. read more [Less]

MonoDevelop has a code navigation history. When you switch views, or jump around between definitions, it logs the history, and you can browse back and forth like a web browser. However, it has some major issues -- the history it generates is ... [More] unintuitive and erratic. It seems like it should be a really useful feature, but in practice is frustrating to use, so I recently decided to give it an overhaul. read more [Less]

When I initially wrote the ASP.NET code completion, I added support for completing attribute values for enums and bools. More generalised completion using TypeConverter.GetStandardValues isn't so easy, since I don't want to load arbitrary types into ... [More] the MD process, so I skipped this for now. However, I did special-case System.Drawing.Color, since it's used a lot. This morning, on a suggestion from Aaron, I tweaked it to generate custom icons for each colour: In other news, I landed the new ASP.NET completion parser, which is much more robust, and is also able to generate a tree, so it will soon replace the DOM parser too. The new design also means I'll be able to unify it with the XML and Moonlight (XAML) addins. I recently returned from a family holiday in Maine, and will post photos when I got them sorted out and uploaded to Flickr. read more [Less]