+ 8 - 5 | § ¶MonoDevelop improvements
I'll post an update about new ASP.NET 2.0 features in Mono, but right now I'd like to talk about MonoDevelop. There have been important improvements in MD in the last weeks. Some of them are GUI improvements, but the most important ones are changes in the internal architecture of MD. Those changes make MD more extensible, more reliable and easier to maintain. There is still a lot of work to do, but I'm starting to feel comfortable with the MD code.Taking advantage of the new extensibility features, I've written an addin that will make the life easier for those who want to use MonoDevelop to develop Mono itself. This addin provides a custom project reader that can parse Mono Makefiles and create a structure of combines and projects from them. You can now go to Open File, select the mcs root Makefile (or any other Mono Makefile) and MD will create a structure like this:
Beware! the first time you try it, the code completion engine will parse all source files, and this can take quite a lot of time and memory, since there are LOTS of files.
Don't be confused. MD is not importing the Makefile, it is using the Makefile like a native project file format. Notice that this can be done because Mono's Makefiles have a well known structure and the basic information (such as files that belong to the project, and project references) can be easily parsed. So don't take this as a general "import Makefile" solution.
Operations like adding, renaming and removing files from a project are supported, and the corresponding .sources file will be updated. Other changes to the project configuration are not saved.
You can also build Mono projects from inside MD. There is a new MonoProject class that overrides the Build method and invokes the 'make' command to build the assembly. This integrates nicely with the new build output pad:
The MonoProject parses the error messages from the output of the makefile and provides enough information so MD can fill the error list:
Mono Projects are created with two configurations: .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0. You can set any of those to build using the default or net_2_0 profile. There is also a new command "Install" in the project contextual menu, which is like running "make install" in the project directory. The result is of course shown in the output pad.
This addin is now in the MonoDevelop SVN repository, so to use it you only need to "svn up" and compile.
There are still some memory issues that need to be fixed (looks like gtk# is having some problems with references), but things are progressing well, and I plan to fully switch to MD as development tool as soon as those get fixed.