Monodevelop
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.
I noticed that this post is not receiving any comments but what a shame! I was thinking the same things you have so aptly pointed out.
ditto to all that you have said! The gaping holes are very frustrating. I am working on a program to combat these problems. I’ll let you know when I have been successful.