Mono Development, especially on Windows

February 23, 2005 11:35 AM

Anyone here doing Mono Development on Windows? Or other platforms? What's your development environment? General advice for learning the platform?

I'm interested in learning C# and to some extent .NET, and I have an idea for an application. It needs to deploy on both Mac OS X and Windows, and while I could go the Java direction, I'm really intruiged by Mono.

I don't want to host the development on Linux, though -- since my target platforms are Windows and OS X, it makes sense to do the development on one or the other (or both).

However -- it looks like the MonoDevelop IDE is really only up to speed on Linux. Is there another IDE? Or... how's development just using text-editors and the command line tools?

And finally, any advice on just picking up Mono in general?

posted by namespan to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I use Eclipse for Java development on OS X, as well as Apple's dev tools.

The link above explains how to add the Mono/C# dev't plug-in to Eclipse.

You can also use Apple's Developer's Tools to do Mono development.

I like Apple's tools, but Eclipse is cross-platform, and so it is a more "bankable" skill.
posted by AlexReynolds at 11:43 AM on February 23, 2005

I use both mono and SharpDevelop -- not together, though (I use mono on Linux and SharpDevelop on Windows with MS .NET); I only use SharpDevelop as an editor, for which purpose it works reasonably well (not that I'm knocking its other IDE features -- I simply don't tend to use IDEs except as editors in general). Well, that and vi -- and occasionally xemacs.

I've tried Eclipse (which is wonderful with Java) with the C# plugin, which was immature and IMHO not useable. The last time I tried it was nearly a year ago; at that time further development of the C# plugin seemed effectively nonexistant, but it's quite possible it's improved since then.
posted by SeanCier at 3:12 PM on February 23, 2005

We've looked at it since we do a lot of C# work (in VS.NET) but there hasn't been a need. Right now for rapid development across platforms, I've been happy with Python and wxWidgets.

any advice on just picking up Mono in general?

I know Mono is an offshoot of Gnome (or at least I think I know that), but is there a point to learning Mono by itself without a .NET-related language?
posted by yerfatma at 3:52 PM on February 23, 2005

is there a point to learning Mono by itself without a .NET-related language?

I'm planning on learning C#, so that answers that question, and I've heard that Mono will support Python and others at some point....
posted by namespan at 5:46 PM on February 23, 2005

Can you use Visual C# Express Edition? It's free, or at least it was when I downloaded it.
posted by smackfu at 7:08 PM on February 23, 2005

Visual C# Express beta is beer-free, but it's going to be for-pay when it's released if I understand correctly. I haven't had much of a chance to play with Mono yet, but Miguel de Icaza's blog is a good way to keep up on it's development. It looks like a new stable version was released over the weekend, and it includes the new Windows.Forms implementation. Oh and Miguel links to a Windows.Forms on OS X tutorial here (scroll down).
posted by nomad at 8:12 PM on February 24, 2005