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. It hasn't been easy to make this port fully operational, but we now have a GIT core that can be easily updated and which is fully portable.
We have also spent some time improving all the version control views. I like especially the new changes view integrated in the source editor, and the log view (which btw can show gravatar icons of committers). We plan to keep improving those views to make them even more functional.
Another big change in this release is the new MCS based parser and formatting engine. Mike Krueger (in charge of the C# support) and Marek Safar (maintainer of the MCS compiler) have been collaborating to make the MCS parser usable in MonoDevelop. By using MCS, we'll be able to quickly have support for the latest C# features, and we'll be able to report syntactic errors on-the-fly that exactly match those reported by the compiler. Also thanks to MCS, the C# formatter is more reliable and will allow to properly implement on-the-fly formatting on all contexts.
We also added in this release support for user defined policies. The concept of "Policies" was introduced in MonoDevelop 2.4. Policies are settings which can be applied per-solution and per-project. Policies include settings like code formatting rules, standard header for files or naming policies. Until now, we supported setting the default values for those policies, which would be used when creating new projects. Beside this, we now also support creating named sets of policies. So for example, an user could define a "Company" policy set with formatting rules and file headers specific for company projects. It could also define a "Open Source" policy set with different rules. When creating a project, the user can then chose which policies to use.
Another feature we added is support for IL disassembly in the debugger. This will be very useful for developers that need to debug dynamically generated methods and assemblies.
Finally, we also have a brand new add-in manager, which is more functional and looks much better. MonoDevelop is now subscribed to the public repository available in addins.monodevelop.com, which is open to everybody for publishing add-ins and making them available to all MonoDevelop users.
Update: forgot to mention one important improvement that has been requested by Mac users for long time: support for native OSX dialogs. Message and file dialogs on Mac now use the native UI toolkit.
There are many other improvements and new features in this release. Take a look at What's new in MonoDevelop 2.6 if you want to know more.
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