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 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.