MonoDevelop

The past month or two, in addition to bugfixing for our recent MonoDevelop 2.0 release, I've been quietly hacking on a MonoDevelop Addin to support writing ASP.NET MVC applications. Those of you following me on Twitter may have picked up a few ... [More] hints... Now that Microsoft has released ASP.NET MVC under the MS-Pl licence, I'm making a preview release of the ASP.NET MVC addin for people who'd like to start playing with this exciting new tech on Mono. It's relatively immature, so don't expect everything to work perfectly, but it handles creating and running a VS-compatible ASP.NET MVC project just fine. read more [Less]

Yet another step towards 2.0 release. We released Beta 1 last week with many fixes and some new interesting features (here are the release notes).The one I like more is the support for per-project policies. This feature has been planned for long time ... [More] but other work has been delaying it. Me and Michael Hutchinson had a chance to talk quite a lot about it while I was at Boston a couple of months ago. The policies model allows setting properties at global, solution, folder and project levels. Settings such as tab width can be defined in any of those levels and will cascade down to the lower levels (where it can be overriden if required). Many settings are already available in this way, and many more will be in future releases.Another new feature, or rather improvement, is the support for multiple frameworks. MD already had support for targeting the 1.1/2.0 CLR for quite a long time, but did not have the concept of 'target framework', which is more generic. For example, .NET 3.0 is based on the 2.0 CLR and it just includes some additional assemblies. What complicates things a bit is that Mono does not follow the .NET releases, so for example Mono 2.0 includes bits from all .NET versions. To simplify all this and to be compatible with MSBuild, it is now possible to select the target .NET framework, which includes 1.1, 2.0, 2.1 (Silverlight), 3.0 and 3.5. The project system is fully aware of the chosen target framework, so for example it won't let you reference a 3.5 project from a 3.0 project.The source editor keeps improving in many ways. Mike Krueger has spent quite a lot of time fixing issues in code completion, which now works in many more contexts. My contribution on code completion (besides stabilization work in the parser database) is support for completion of generic types with constraints. For example, in the following class code completion is showing the Dispose method because there is a constraint forcing the generic argument to implement it:There are other improvements, such as the new Go to File dialog I blogged about some time ago, better support for completion in ASP.NET projects, and fixes in the GTK# designer. There is still a lot of work to do, but we are getting close to 2.0. [Less]

Yet another step towards 2.0 release. We released Beta 1 last week with many fixes and some new interesting features (here are the release notes).The one I like more is the support for per-project policies. This feature has been planned for long time ... [More] but other work has been delaying it. Me and Michael Hutchinson had a chance to talk quite a lot about it while I was at Boston a couple of months ago. The policies model allows setting properties at global, solution, folder and project levels. Settings such as tab width can be defined in any of those levels and will cascade down to the lower levels (where it can be overriden if required). Many settings are already available in this way, and many more will be in future releases.Another new feature, or rather improvement, is the support for multiple frameworks. MD already had support for targeting the 1.1/2.0 CLR for quite a long time, but did not have the concept of 'target framework', which is more generic. For example, .NET 3.0 is based on the 2.0 CLR and it just includes some additional assemblies. What complicates things a bit is that Mono does not follow the .NET releases, so for example Mono 2.0 includes bits from all .NET versions. To simplify all this and to be compatible with MSBuild, it is now possible to select the target .NET framework, which includes 1.1, 2.0, 2.1 (Silverlight), 3.0 and 3.5. The project system is fully aware of the chosen target framework, so for example it won't let you reference a 3.5 project from a 3.0 project.The source editor keeps improving in many ways. Mike Krueger has spent quite a lot of time fixing issues in code completion, which now works in many more contexts. My contribution on code completion (besides stabilization work in the parser database) is support for completion of generic types with constraints. For example, in the following class code completion is showing the Dispose method because there is a constraint forcing the generic argument to implement it:There are other improvements, such as the new Go to File dialog I blogged about some time ago, better support for completion in ASP.NET projects, and fixes in the GTK# designer. There is still a lot of work to do, but we are getting close to 2.0. [Less]

Yet another step towards 2.0 release. We released Beta 1 last week with many fixes and some new interesting features (here are the release notes).The one I like more is the support for per-project policies. This feature has been planned for long time ... [More] but other work has been delaying it. Me and Michael Hutchinson had a chance to talk quite a lot about it while I was at Boston a couple of months ago. The policies model allows setting properties at global, solution, folder and project levels. Settings such as tab width can be defined in any of those levels and will cascade down to the lower levels (where it can be overriden if required). Many settings are already available in this way, and many more will be in future releases.Another new feature, or rather improvement, is the support for multiple frameworks. MD already had support for targeting the 1.1/2.0 CLR for quite a long time, but did not have the concept of 'target framework', which is more generic. For example, .NET 3.0 is based on the 2.0 CLR and it just includes some additional assemblies. What complicates things a bit is that Mono does not follow the .NET releases, so for example Mono 2.0 includes bits from all .NET versions. To simplify all this and to be compatible with MSBuild, it is now possible to select the target .NET framework, which includes 1.1, 2.0, 2.1 (Silverlight), 3.0 and 3.5. The project system is fully aware of the chosen target framework, so for example it won't let you reference a 3.5 project from a 3.0 project.The source editor keeps improving in many ways. Mike Krueger has spent quite a lot of time fixing issues in code completion, which now works in many more contexts. My contribution on code completion (besides stabilization work in the parser database) is support for completion of generic types with constraints. For example, in the following class code completion is showing the Dispose method because there is a constraint forcing the generic argument to implement it:There are other improvements, such as the new Go to File dialog I blogged about some time ago, better support for completion in ASP.NET projects, and fixes in the GTK# designer. There is still a lot of work to do, but we are getting close to 2.0. [Less]

Yet another step towards 2.0 release. We released Beta 1 last week with many fixes and some new interesting features (here are the release notes).The one I like more is the support for per-project policies. This feature has been planned for long time ... [More] but other work has been delaying it. Me and Michael Hutchinson had a chance to talk quite a lot about it while I was at Boston a couple of months ago. The policies model allows setting properties at global, solution, folder and project levels. Settings such as tab width can be defined in any of those levels and will cascade down to the lower levels (where it can be overriden if required). Many settings are already available in this way, and many more will be in future releases.Another new feature, or rather improvement, is the support for multiple frameworks. MD already had support for targeting the 1.1/2.0 CLR for quite a long time, but did not have the concept of 'target framework', which is more generic. For example, .NET 3.0 is based on the 2.0 CLR and it just includes some additional assemblies. What complicates things a bit is that Mono does not follow the .NET releases, so for example Mono 2.0 includes bits from all .NET versions. To simplify all this and to be compatible with MSBuild, it is now possible to select the target .NET framework, which includes 1.1, 2.0, 2.1 (Silverlight), 3.0 and 3.5. The project system is fully aware of the chosen target framework, so for example it won't let you reference a 3.5 project from a 3.0 project.The source editor keeps improving in many ways. Mike Krueger has spent quite a lot of time fixing issues in code completion, which now works in many more contexts. My contribution on code completion (besides stabilization work in the parser database) is support for completion of generic types with constraints. For example, in the following class code completion is showing the Dispose method because there is a constraint forcing the generic argument to implement it:There are other improvements, such as the new Go to File dialog I blogged about some time ago, better support for completion in ASP.NET projects, and fixes in the GTK# designer. There is still a lot of work to do, but we are getting close to 2.0. [Less]

Last night I got MonoDevelop working (to some extent) on Windows Vista x64 using the Linux binaries, tweeting my progress along the way. UPDATE: In another 5am hacking run this evening, I've managed to build MonoDevelop fully in Visual Studio 2008 ... [More] , and debug at all the way to the Welcome Page, using 32-bit debugging on Vista 64. However, I'm going to have to tidy the project file fixes a lot before I commit them. read more [Less]

Last Friday we released MonoDevelop 2.0 alpha 2. This is an exciting release because for the first time it includes debugger integration. This integration is not yet perfect, the debugger is not yet 100% stable and not all features are available, but ... [More] we finally have some debugging support. This has been the #1 feature request for long time. You can take a look at my previous post about the debugger to get an idea of what it looks like.In addition to the Mono Debugger (MDB), I also have spent some time improving the GDB integration. We now have support for expression evaluation, which can be used in conditional breakpoints and tracepoints. The debugging service in MonoDevelop is extensible, so we can plug support for different debuggers into it. I hope we can add support for debugging other non-.net based languages in the future.Anyway, here is a screenshot of a debug tooltip in a GDB debug session:The other big improvement in alpha 2 is the new code completion engine, on which Mike Krueger has been working. The new engine supports "aggresive" code completion, which means that the completion window will be shown in any context by just typing the first char of an identifier. It also has some nice features such as automatic insertion of event handlers or anonymous methods when completing an event subscription. In addition, the C# parser has been upgraded to support C# 3, and we already support some of the new C# features, such as completion of extension methods. The new engine still needs polishing and performance improvements, but it is looking great.Michael Hutchinson has done a great job improving the editing experience for ASP.NET, HTML and XML files. There is better support for code completion and CodeBehind files. Compatibility with Visual Studio 2008 has improved, and we now have preliminary support for creating Moonlight projects. Many hackers will also be interested in the new vi mode that has been implemented for the text editor.The GTK# designer has also some improvements. Mike Kestner became the maintainer of the designer some months ago, and he's been learning about the inner workings, and doing some fixes and improvements. One of the main changes is the simplification of the GTK# settings panel. It is not necessary to explicitly enable GTK# support on projects in order to use the designer. Now it can be done by just adding a reference to GTK#. Also, exporting a widget so it can be used in another project is as simple as applying a [ToolboxItem] attribute to the widget class.Ankit Jain did a great job with the new Override/Implement dialog, which allows to easily implement members defined in a base class or interface. Here is a screenhot:Ankit is now working behind the scenes to complete xbuild, our MSBuild implementation. The mid term plan is to replace MD's build system by xbuild, but this won't happen before MD 2.0.There are many other improvements in version control support, project management and others, but you'll have to take a look at the release notes to know more.In the following weeks we are going to focus on bug fixing, and we plan to release a 2.0 Beta 1 soon (the plan was to release before Christmas, but holidays may not permit it). In the meanwhile I hope you find alpha 2 useful and file any bug you can find so we can fix it to make MD 2.0 an awesome release. [Less]

Last Friday we released MonoDevelop 2.0 alpha 2. This is an exciting release because for the first time it includes debugger integration. This integration is not yet perfect, the debugger is not yet 100% stable and not all features are available, but ... [More] we finally have some debugging support. This has been the #1 feature request for long time. You can take a look at my previous post about the debugger to get an idea of what it looks like.In addition to the Mono Debugger (MDB), I also have spent some time improving the GDB integration. We now have support for expression evaluation, which can be used in conditional breakpoints and tracepoints. The debugging service in MonoDevelop is extensible, so we can plug support for different debuggers into it. I hope we can add support for debugging other non-.net based languages in the future.Anyway, here is a screenshot of a debug tooltip in a GDB debug session:The other big improvement in alpha 2 is the new code completion engine, on which Mike Krueger has been working. The new engine supports "aggresive" code completion, which means that the completion window will be shown in any context by just typing the first char of an identifier. It also has some nice features such as automatic insertion of event handlers or anonymous methods when completing an event subscription. In addition, the C# parser has been upgraded to support C# 3, and we already support some of the new C# features, such as completion of extension methods. The new engine still needs polishing and performance improvements, but it is looking great.Michael Hutchinson has done a great job improving the editing experience for ASP.NET, HTML and XML files. There is better support for code completion and CodeBehind files. Compatibility with Visual Studio 2008 has improved, and we now have preliminary support for creating Moonlight projects. Many hackers will also be interested in the new vi mode that has been implemented for the text editor.The GTK# designer has also some improvements. Mike Kestner became the maintainer of the designer some months ago, and he's been learning about the inner workings, and doing some fixes and improvements. One of the main changes is the simplification of the GTK# settings panel. It is not necessary to explicitly enable GTK# support on projects in order to use the designer. Now it can be done by just adding a reference to GTK#. Also, exporting a widget so it can be used in another project is as simple as applying a [ToolboxItem] attribute to the widget class.Ankit Jain did a great job with the new Override/Implement dialog, which allows to easily implement members defined in a base class or interface. Here is a screenhot:Ankit is now working behind the scenes to complete xbuild, our MSBuild implementation. The mid term plan is to replace MD's build system by xbuild, but this won't happen before MD 2.0.There are many other improvements in version control support, project management and others, but you'll have to take a look at the release notes to know more.In the following weeks we are going to focus on bug fixing, and we plan to release a 2.0 Beta 1 soon (the plan was to release before Christmas, but holidays may not permit it). In the meanwhile I hope you find alpha 2 useful and file any bug you can find so we can fix it to make MD 2.0 an awesome release. [Less]

Last Friday we released MonoDevelop 2.0 alpha 2. This is an exciting release because for the first time it includes debugger integration. This integration is not yet perfect, the debugger is not yet 100% stable and not all features are available, but ... [More] we finally have some debugging support. This has been the #1 feature request for long time. You can take a look at my previous post about the debugger to get an idea of what it looks like.In addition to the Mono Debugger (MDB), I also have spent some time improving the GDB integration. We now have support for expression evaluation, which can be used in conditional breakpoints and tracepoints. The debugging service in MonoDevelop is extensible, so we can plug support for different debuggers into it. I hope we can add support for debugging other non-.net based languages in the future.Anyway, here is a screenshot of a debug tooltip in a GDB debug session:The other big improvement in alpha 2 is the new code completion engine, on which Mike Krueger has been working. The new engine supports "aggresive" code completion, which means that the completion window will be shown in any context by just typing the first char of an identifier. It also has some nice features such as automatic insertion of event handlers or anonymous methods when completing an event subscription. In addition, the C# parser has been upgraded to support C# 3, and we already support some of the new C# features, such as completion of extension methods. The new engine still needs polishing and performance improvements, but it is looking great.Michael Hutchinson has done a great job improving the editing experience for ASP.NET, HTML and XML files. There is better support for code completion and CodeBehind files. Compatibility with Visual Studio 2008 has improved, and we now have preliminary support for creating Moonlight projects. Many hackers will also be interested in the new vi mode that has been implemented for the text editor.The GTK# designer has also some improvements. Mike Kestner became the maintainer of the designer some months ago, and he's been learning about the inner workings, and doing some fixes and improvements. One of the main changes is the simplification of the GTK# settings panel. It is not necessary to explicitly enable GTK# support on projects in order to use the designer. Now it can be done by just adding a reference to GTK#. Also, exporting a widget so it can be used in another project is as simple as applying a [ToolboxItem] attribute to the widget class.Ankit Jain did a great job with the new Override/Implement dialog, which allows to easily implement members defined in a base class or interface. Here is a screenhot:Ankit is now working behind the scenes to complete xbuild, our MSBuild implementation. The mid term plan is to replace MD's build system by xbuild, but this won't happen before MD 2.0.There are many other improvements in version control support, project management and others, but you'll have to take a look at the release notes to know more.In the following weeks we are going to focus on bug fixing, and we plan to release a 2.0 Beta 1 soon (the plan was to release before Christmas, but holidays may not permit it). In the meanwhile I hope you find alpha 2 useful and file any bug you can find so we can fix it to make MD 2.0 an awesome release. [Less]

Last Friday we released MonoDevelop 2.0 alpha 2. This is an exciting release because for the first time it includes debugger integration. This integration is not yet perfect, the debugger is not yet 100% stable and not all features are available, but ... [More] we finally have some debugging support. This has been the #1 feature request for long time. You can take a look at my previous post about the debugger to get an idea of what it looks like.In addition to the Mono Debugger (MDB), I also have spent some time improving the GDB integration. We now have support for expression evaluation, which can be used in conditional breakpoints and tracepoints. The debugging service in MonoDevelop is extensible, so we can plug support for different debuggers into it. I hope we can add support for debugging other non-.net based languages in the future.Anyway, here is a screenshot of a debug tooltip in a GDB debug session:The other big improvement in alpha 2 is the new code completion engine, on which Mike Krueger has been working. The new engine supports "aggresive" code completion, which means that the completion window will be shown in any context by just typing the first char of an identifier. It also has some nice features such as automatic insertion of event handlers or anonymous methods when completing an event subscription. In addition, the C# parser has been upgraded to support C# 3, and we already support some of the new C# features, such as completion of extension methods. The new engine still needs polishing and performance improvements, but it is looking great.Michael Hutchinson has done a great job improving the editing experience for ASP.NET, HTML and XML files. There is better support for code completion and CodeBehind files. Compatibility with Visual Studio 2008 has improved, and we now have preliminary support for creating Moonlight projects. Many hackers will also be interested in the new vi mode that has been implemented for the text editor.The GTK# designer has also some improvements. Mike Kestner became the maintainer of the designer some months ago, and he's been learning about the inner workings, and doing some fixes and improvements. One of the main changes is the simplification of the GTK# settings panel. It is not necessary to explicitly enable GTK# support on projects in order to use the designer. Now it can be done by just adding a reference to GTK#. Also, exporting a widget so it can be used in another project is as simple as applying a [ToolboxItem] attribute to the widget class.Ankit Jain did a great job with the new Override/Implement dialog, which allows to easily implement members defined in a base class or interface. Here is a screenhot:Ankit is now working behind the scenes to complete xbuild, our MSBuild implementation. The mid term plan is to replace MD's build system by xbuild, but this won't happen before MD 2.0.There are many other improvements in version control support, project management and others, but you'll have to take a look at the release notes to know more.In the following weeks we are going to focus on bug fixing, and we plan to release a 2.0 Beta 1 soon (the plan was to release before Christmas, but holidays may not permit it). In the meanwhile I hope you find alpha 2 useful and file any bug you can find so we can fix it to make MD 2.0 an awesome release. [Less]