Who So » MonoDevelop

Goal achievement: Becoming a better C#-developer

Trond Husø — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 08:00:42 +0000

I am currently coding a translator service in Windows in C# (VS 2005) and so I am on track on the goal of becoming a better C#-developer.
I really like the C# language and the .Net framework, and most importantly the Visual Studio development tool. Microsoft has done so many things correct when they developed VS.
Now Visual Programming isn’t something new from the guys in Redmond, USA. I have been on and off developing in Visual Basic since version 1.0 which was released in 1991. So Microsoft has quite a history to look back on and use when they develop these tools.
I also believe that learning C# makes me a better PHP-developer too (which is also on the list of goals for 2010).
One thing though, and I know I am not alone here. Switching back and forth between C# and VB.Net makes you add some ; (semicolons) at the end of each line. And C# is now looking more intuitive than VB.Net.
I shall also spend some time in Mono Develop. This because it uses C# as well. And the more you code…

Monodevelop vs Visual Studio – or what the monoteam could learn from VS

Trond Husø — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 08:00:04 +0000

What a long title… But why not.
This week has been exhausting for mr. Huso. It has been some security holes and more.
But I have also noticed something that I think the mono developer team should start doing.
This past week I was part of a small team that upgraded a website from .Net 1.1 to .Net 3.5. In this process I noticed that, and I knew this from earlier, that with each visual studio release there is a new .Net Framework.
So: If you run vs 2008, you are coding against .net 3.5. The new VS 2010 will use the 4.0 version of the framework.
How about MonoDevelop (which is an just as awesome IDE/RAD).
There is a bug in Podsleuth that I wanted to look at and hopefully fix (tired of not being able to update my iPod in Banshee under Ubuntu). So I fired up MonoDevelop. But since I needed debugging information on the “service”, I needed some help. Best place is IRC.
And I got in touch with some people there. And they told me that MD 2.2 has this feature. So of I went to download and install it (apt-get and so on).
Unfortunately MD2.2 does not fire a dependency warning on Mono 2.4 that it also needs. So installing and using MD2.2 isn’t quite as easy.
So this is what the MD/M-team should learn from the guys in Redmond: Whenever you update the Mono Framework, update the MonoDevelop package as well. And release them at the same time!
Maybe they should change the versioning as well, following VS. So MonoDevelop 2.4 could be MonoDevelop 2010. Mono could follow the versioning that they are doing now.
Important: This is not meant to disgrace the great work the Monodevelop-team is doing, it’s just a public personal suggestion…

IDE/Weaver/Studio Ramblings

Trond Husø — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:04:07 +0000

On the Linux platform we (web) developers have quite a lot of texteditors or IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to choose from.

What I miss are tools like Visual Studio and Dreamweaver. I know that we have MonoDevelop on the Linux (Windows and Mac)-side, but this is mostly a development environment for developing applications (and ASPX-websites). We also have Qt (which shall support PHP, but I haven’t checked it out – yet) and RealBasic.

I am glad that those development tools exists. Without them Linux-developers would still be working with one program that creates the GUI, and another (most likely VI(m)) where code development would happen. There are positive side effects from separating code and GUI like that, but at the same time it makes developing a tad bit harder. Coming from the Window-side (who hasn’t?) I have been used to GUI-design and code in the same program since Visual Basic 1.0 and Borland Delphi 1.0, and later Visual Studio.
To me using MonoDevelop is as natural as coding in those before mentioned programming tools.

On the web side (thinking PHP, Perl and probably also Ruby here) we are lagging behind Windows here. I know we have Kompozer (former NVU) on the Linux side, but this tool lacks a lot of the features that Dreamweaver has. Also: it is filled with bugs.

I really wish that ActiveState, Aptana and/or Eclipse would step up and start working on a “Studio”-like software where designers can design the website easily (and of course clean up the HTML afterwards) and the developers can create the code to make the website work as intended – in the same software. I really hope we get there one day.
One feature that I would very much like to see is that if a developer created a class for, let’s say HTML-form-elements, this class could be added to the toolbar and be used by designers later.