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 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!
Posted by
30

View comments

I started the XWT project almost one year ago and athough I talked about it at FOSDEM, I never found the time to formally present it. Those are busy days at Xamarin! Anyway, let’s go ahead.

XWT is an open-source cross-platform UI toolkit for Mono and .NET. What’s special about XWT is that it is built on top of the native widget toolkit of each supported platform. So rather than a new widget toolkit implemented from scratch it is an abstraction that wraps the native toolkits using a common API. The end goal of XWT is to allow building applications which look and feel native in each platform. Here are some screenshots of a sample application running with the GTK and Cocoa backends:

I initially created XWT with the idea of building MonoDevelop on top of it.
4

MonoDevelop 2.6 beta 1 was released yesterday. Like every major release, it has many new features. Here is a summary of what have we done.

The first new big feature is support for GIT. This was long time due, especially since Mono and MonoDevelop itself moved to GIT. I already blogged about it a few months ago, but basically we are using NGit, a C# port of JGit, as the core for the GIT add-in.
6

MonoDevelop often makes use of threads to run operations on the background. Although we make sure to invoke all GUI update methods through the main GUI thread, sometimes there is a bug and an update is done in the secondary thread, which causes all sort of random locks and crashes.

To make it easier to track down those bugs, I created a simple profiler module for Mono which can detect invocations to GTK# methods from a thread other than the main GUI thread.
2

I'm flying to Brussels in a few minutes, heading to Fosdem. I'm not giving a talk this year, but if you are interested in knowing more about Mono and MonoDevelop don't miss the Mono track on Saturday afternoon. Many nice talks, and a good chance to meet Mono developers and contributors.
1

One of the features we want to include in the next MonoDevelop release is integrated support of Git. I committed a first version of a git add-in some months ago which works by invoking the git command and parsing the results. This solution satisfied some basic needs (Mono was moving to git at that time), but it was done as a short term solution, since parsing git output is not very reliable, and has portability issues.
26

I just published the source code of Cydin in github. Cydin is an add-in repository for applications based on Mono.Addins. The latest version is currently running the MonoDevelop add-in repo. I have many ideas to keep improving Cydin. Here are a few:Add support for multiple applications. That's almost done, but there are still some issues to be fixed.
2

Yesterday I published a beta version of what is going to be a Community add-in repository for MonoDevelop. This web site is based on the Cydin project, developed during the last hack-week at Novell.

The functionality it has is basically what explained in my last blog post:

The add-in developer creates a new project in the web site by specifying a name, description and version control urls to the source code.

Last week was a Hack Week at Novell, so I spent some time working on a new idea I've been cooking in the past weeks: a Community Add-in Repository for MonoDevelop, which I'm calling Cydin.

The idea is to have a web site where add-in developers can publish their MonoDevelop add-ins and make them available to all users.
5

In the past weeks (actually, months) I've been doing some changes in the MonoDevelop GUI to make it more functional and better looking. Here is the result:

Before

After

Changes in the Status Bar

Everything started with the idea of removing the status bar, in order to save space in the main window. The plan was to use something similar to Chrome's status popups, which are visible only when there is actual information to show to the user.
24

Miguel recently blogged about a trick for loading an executable assembly as a project inside MonoDevelop. I have now added native support for this feature, which means that it is now possible to directly open a .exe or .dll as a project, or add it to an existing solution. Also, MonoDevelop will get the list of source code files from the debug info of the assembly (when available). For example, this is what you get when you open gmcs.exe:

The code just landed in SVN.
1
Blog Archive
Blog Archive
About Me
About Me
My complete name is Lluis Sanchez Gual, and I work as a developer for Novell. I'm part of the Mono team, and I'm leading the MonoDevelop project, a very exciting open source IDE for GNOME.
Loading