+ 8 - 3 | § ¶Designing menus
I've been working lately on a menu designer for Stetic/Monodevelop. The designer is based on the UIManager/Action/ActionGroup model, and it has been a real challenge to make easy building menus, and at the same time take advantage of all features this model provides.Building a menu is really easy and 'visual'. You only need to add a menu bar to the window and start writing options. The menu designer looks like a regular menu, but clicking on a menu it will select it, so you can change its properties using the Properties pad. Clicking again on the menu item when it is selected will start the editing mode of the menu item, in which you can change the label or the icon. This is how it looks like:
When you are creating menu items in this way, at the same time the designer creates Actions for each menu item. Those actions are added to the window's default ActionGroup. In the screenshot you'll see that the widget palette now has a new section named "Actions", which shows all actions added to the window. If you had a toolbar, you could drag & drop those actions into it (not yet implemented, though).
You've also probably noticed a new "Actions" tab in the text editor. This new tab shows a visual representation of the action group bound to the window, and looks like this:
It is basically a list of all actions defined in the window. In this designer you can select and change the properties of the actions, and even bind actions to fields, so you can change the sensitivity or visibility of the action at run time.
This default action group is local to the window, which means that handlers for action signals will be added to the window's class, and fields for the actions will be added also to the window class. It also means that if you create another window with another menu bar, you won't be able to reuse the actions from another window. In case you want to share actions between windows, you'll need to create a global action group. In the New File dialog there is a new icon for creating global action groups. A global action group is not bound to a specific window, but it has its own class, and signals and fields are mapped there. Actions belonging to global action groups will always be shown in the palette, so you can add them to any window.
Icon Factories
Stetic/MonoDevelop can now manage icons to be included in a project. The idea is that you select some images, give them an ID, and Stetic will generate a Gtk.IconFactory for you and will register the icons there. You can then use that ID when creating buttons or whatever that requires an stock id. This was needed to make it easy to create actions with custom images, since actions can only use stock ids, not pixbufs. Here is a screenshot of the Edit Icon dialog:
.NET 2.0 in MonoDevelop
MonoDevelop is now being compiled with gmcs. This change is needed to be able to reuse some of the code from SharpDevelop 2.0, and will allow us to use nice 2.0 features. I also committed NRefactory into MD's svn and made the necessary changes to our c# binding, so now MD can properly parse C# 2.0 source code files. Generic classes are still not very well supported by our c# binding, but at least they are properly parsed. If you find any issue after this change, please let me know. We need to do a good testing before the next release, since this is an important change.
+ 3 - 4 | § ¶Summer is approaching
I'm really happy with the last MonoDevelop release. Looks like a GUI designer is just what people was waiting for, and we've got very positive feedback. I'm planing a new release (0.11) very soon which will fix many of the bugs reported in the last weeks. MD 0.11 will also have support for compiling .NET 2.0 assemblies. To make it possible I had to change some of the compilation and code completion classes, since they could only manage .NET 1.1 assemblies, or being more precise, assemblies compiled with the same version MD is compiled. Now MD is completely independent from the assemblies it manages (thanks to Cecil!), so we can safely start compiling MD with gmcs, and still be able to support both 1.1 and 2.0 projects. MD 0.12 is probably a good target for this change.However, we still don't have a parser for C# 2.0, so code completion will not work when using 2.0 syntax. The plan is to reuse the parser from SharpDevelop, and this is yet another reason for compiling MD with gmcs, since SharpDevelop needs .NET 2.0.
I'm also working on the menu designer, but it won't make it for this release. This designer is starting to look really nice, but there are still some issues I need to solve, specially about how to map Actions, Action Groups and their signals into C# classes and methods. In any case, I think the menu designer should be ready for MD 0.12.
I've been able to find some time lately for writing documentation. I updated the Writing an Add-in article (the old one was really obsolete), and added Add-in Extension Tree Reference. This last article is (more or less) automatically generated from the add-in xml files, and provides the complete list of items you can extend in MonoDevelop.
Google Summer Of Code
We have several project proposals for the Google SOC. If you are willing to apply, do it quickly since the deadline is May 8, only 4 days left!