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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Registration for the upcoming .NET/Mono Code Camp in Spain is open and filling up quickly, so if you are interested in attending, register now!

The agenda has also been published.
I added a new document to the MonoDevelop developers documentation page: API Overview.

The public MonoDevelop API is really extensive, and it is not easy for add-in developers to find out which part of the API they have to use to do certain operations.
I committed today very basic support for building projects using MSBuild / XBuild instead of MonoDevelop's own build system. Ankit has been doing a lot of progress in XBuild, and it is mature enough to build complex projects. XBuild support is for now disabled by default.
How to build MonoDevelop with Visual Studio in five easy steps:

Install GTK# (get installer here)Install the Mono Libraries (get installer here)Get MonoDevelop from SVN (update: instructions here)

Open main/Main.sln in Visual StudioPress F5 (update: make sure you have the configuration DebugWin32
A new MonoDevelop installer for Windows is available.

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!
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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.
Many people has been asking about the status of the debugger integration in MonoDevelop, so I thought it would be a good idea to post a quick status report.

The short answer is that we are working on it.
Last Friday MonoDevelop 1.0 was released. It is the first time I do an 1.0 release, so it is really exciting to see the release after so much time working on it. To know more about the features of MD, take a look at the release announcement.
MonoDevelop beta 3 was released yesterday, with plenty of bug fixes and some nice improvements. This will hopefully be the last beta, everything should be ready for the final release by the end on January. MonoDevelop has now been branched for the release.
Thanks to everybody that answered the survey! I'm very happy about the amount and the quality of the responses we got: almost 900. This will be a great source of information for planning the future of MonoDevelop. I hope we can repeat this survey next year.

The results are summarized here.
MonoDevelop 1.0 is just around the corner, and it is mostly feature frozen. Now it is time to start thinking beyond 1.0. I published this this survey to get a more clear view of what MonoDevelop is being used for, and what features are the most requested.
Yesterday we released the second beta of MonoDevelop (release notes here). This is mainly a bug fix release. It has tons of bug fixes (and a few new bugs I found while waiting for the packages, but such is life!).
If you found some annoying bugs in MonoDevelop that you'd like to get fixed in the next release.

If you reported some bugs which are not yet fixed maybe because we've not been able to reproduce them.

If you want to help in tracking down some of the issues that MD has...
My hack week project about building a library repository for Mono turned out to be more complex than expected. Actually, I didn't expect it to be simple, but I wanted to have something working (even if not complete) after that week.
Today I spent some time learning about Maven. I got some comments about my library repository idea, and several of them suggested taking a look at Maven.

Maven is basically a pluggable development environment (not to mistake it for an IDE).
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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.
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