Warren Falk

I’m still relatively new to Mono, which is a cross platform, open-source implementation of .Net. The implementation has proved surprisingly gap free for the most part.

But, what Mono suffers from is its lack of Visual Studio. Much of what makes .Net development so effortless is what is a really good implementation of an IDE (refactoring, a really good debugger, smart tags, and several other nice things). An IDE is beyond the scope of the Mono project, and another project, “Monodevelop” is filling in that gap.

Unfortunately, there are still gaping holes which makes it frustrating to anyone who has been spoiled by Visual Studio. I miss the refactoring, the smart tags which prompt you to effortlessly add a “Using” if necessary, but most of all, a debugger.

It is not hard to write complex code, it isn’t hard to write code quickly, but if you need to do both, you really need a debugger to get it right. And this is where Monodevelop (and also Mono) are way short. It’s relatively young still and free open source; and most importantly the developers are planning to implement all these things. I may see about getting in on that myself. But for now, Monodevelop is slightly refreshing but mostly frustrating.

The current version of mono on Ubuntu 7.10 is 1.2.4.2. There are fixes in 1.2.5.2 which I need. Getting 1.2.5.2 built is no problem, but getting it installed without causing all kinds of problems appears to be. This is something I miss about Gentoo.

I’ve tried building my own package, but the official packages for mono are split up into many smaller packages which made that impossible.

I think what I’ll have to do in order to upgrade is to get the source package using apt-get source, unpack it all, and see if I can just replace the 1.4.2.2 code with the 1.2.5.2 code.

I have already pulled the source package down successfully and unpacked it. It looks like the Ubuntu guys applied many patches to it. I don’t know if those patches will work with the new version of code, or if the new version of code contains those patches. It’s probably some combination of the two. This will take some time. I’ll post a follow up if I ever get this working.

Over two years ago I shed Windows from my desktop and built a Gentoo desktop. At the time, I was working from home only and had lots of extra time to tweak, compile and troubleshoot. When I changed jobs again, the lack of time, and compatibility issues with being back in a Microsoft environment at work forced me to abandon my Gentoo and go back to Windows.

Well, I’m still in a Microsoft environment at work, and I still don’t have any time, but now I’m trying to make a go of it again. This time, however, noting my lack of available tinker time, I’m going with the flow and have installed Ubuntu. (I love Gentoo but just don’t have the time to deal with its idiosyncrasies right now).