

Nine Months Later: Mono 2.6 and MonoDevelop 2.2 - pufuwozu
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Dec-15.html

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city41
I've been using MonoDevelop 2.2 builds quite a bit on OSX for developing in
MonoTouch. I have very mixed feelings about it (and granted, I haven't tried
the final 2.2 release yet, but all builds leading up to it).

MonoDevelop is a nice, lighter weight Visual Studio clone. VS users will feel
at home right away. Its intellisense is quite good (just as good as VS's),
it's refactoring is nice, most features are either as good as VS or better.
For example when you do a replace, it highlights in your current document all
instances of your find string to give you a better sense of what the replace
is about to do. There are lots of little touches like that that I really like
a lot.

On OSX at least though, GTK# has some issues. Often times the window ignores
mouse clicks, and this is a massive roadblock to using the app efficiently. To
fix this you have to cause a refocus to happen, such as focus a different app
then come back to MD or focus a different part of MD. If the final release
didn't fix this (and I reported this bug), then that's a huge deal breaker.
This problem really hurts productivity and workflow. I also don't like how MD
doesn't work with apps like SizeUp, and how dialogs are not modal. For
example, the find in files dialog is not modal, so after you use it, it can go
behind the main window. Then from then on the key command to invoke it seems
to do nothing, as the window is still around. You have to go behind the main
window and close it.

TLDR: On OSX, a nice IDE that is very VS-like with some nice added touches,
but has some UI issues that can really hamper it.

~~~
mahmud
Thanks for this. I am just downloading it now. I haven't done any GUI
programming on MS tech since 2001 when I threw away MFC and COM.

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pufuwozu
I'm really interested in the LLVM backend! Probably my favourite part of this
release.

Also make sure you check out MonoDevelop's feature matrix. I'm currently at
work and wanted to try out the Python support but found out it's not supported
on Windows:

[http://monodevelop.com/Download/What%27s_new_in_MonoDevelop_...](http://monodevelop.com/Download/What%27s_new_in_MonoDevelop_2.2#Feature_Matrix)

