Mono and MonoDevelop

At the moment I use a VMware virtual machine for .NET development on the Mac. It is a openSuSE 10.2 installation as originally provided by the mono project. The mono installation is a new compilation from the Olive development branch. As the editor I do use MonoDevelop... although I could have sticked with emacs. At the moment I think the support for .NET on Mac OS X is quite meager. You need to use fink (or macports/darwinports) to recompile GTK and a lot more essentials to get MonoDevelop running. It is a Gnome application?! And same argument here, I could have sticked with emacs... but general development towards fellow workers is easier if done in an IDE. Below is a screenshot of an unmodified project from work in MonoDevelop. Most parts compile without any difficulty, while some might still need some minor adjustments.



It shows how mature Linux is for .NET development. In some places I even think it is a little ahead of the rest. The Silverlight implementation on Linux, called Moonlight, already can run desklets. These are small widgets for the desktop. The code can be found in the Olive trunk. Normally I would have used fedora or ubuntu as my main distro, but I got it working :-D. It opens a lot of opportunities for new applications I was not able to make on the Windows platform. There are a lot of application on Gnome which are mono applications. These are Banshee, Tomboy, gtwitter, Landell and a lot more. I would also like to see our internal application for profile editing to be ported to Un*x/Linux... and have it included in this list.

A very good example of a true crossplatform utility is Tangerine. It is a DAAP server written in Mono which utilizes Avahi to respond to mDNS (or Bonjour) requests. It works on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. I use it daily for distributing music between my vm's who can not use the shared folders.

At the moment I am investigating the usage of D-Bus and a similar idea as mopen.exe to connect services to an active domain. Details will follow...