I guess I’m living on the bleeding edge these days, using Ubuntu Feisty when it’s still in alpha, compiling my favorite C# applications (Banshee yay !) from new version and now I’m even using MonoDevelop from daily Subversion checkout .

I remember that previously building Monodevelop was always a challenge because of conflicting version of Nunit on my box but now Monodevelop includes its own version so, while its a packager nightmare, it make our life easier .

If you want to try yourself go ahead, just do a svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/monodevelop monodevelop-svn; cd monodevelop-svn; ./autogen.sh; ./configure --prefix=~/md-install --disable-monoquery; make; make install that will install everything in the folder md-install in your home directory, I also disable MonoQuery in the build since I don’t find any utility in it but you can do as you wish. To launch your new shiny MonoDevelop svn version just run ~/md-install/bin/monodevelop

So far the first thing I noticed was performance improvements, MonoDevelop now launchs faster, eats less memory and usage is generally smoother. There are several cosmetic changes too. For example take the main window after yesterday checkout :

As you can see tabs and newline are now represented by signs though I don’t know if it really helps readability. If you don’t want it you can disable the signs in Preferences > Editor > Second tab > Show control character (a small typo fix is needed there ). Moreover Monodevelop seems to forget that you don’t like this hype feature so at each time you restart it the signs reappear. Just do the manipulation again and they should hide again.

A cool new feature is the revamped interface for deployment that you can access by right-clicking on Solution > Tools > Create a new package. It leads you to this wizard :

The « Tarball » target is just like before the autotooled version of your software, the « Archive of Sources » includes all your source + the .mdp and .mds files and obviously the last one include only the binary version with each dependency. The wizard then let you choose the project you want to include in the release and ask you for some informations like the destination path, the configuration (Release or Debug) of the target, and a button to remember these informations. Since yesterday I wanted to share a new version of Circ with a friend I really liked the possibility to do a source-only package and a standard autotooled version. Moreover the Autools extension now offer the possibility to create a wrapper script (very basic for the moment) to launch your application, very neat ! It cames under the new « Linux Deployment Settings » menu in the category Deployment of your project’s options (it also offer the possibility to disable the generation of .pc file when the project is a library).

I noticed also some a new « Rename » option on the context menu of each method and fields of a class but unfortunately it seems to be just a stub for the moment as of 05/04 it’s implemented (« announcement« ) :

From the svn ChangeLog I also saw that work was done on the Source Version Control addin but since I don’t use Subversion for my projects I didn’t test it.

Now on the bad part. MonoDevelop is still buggy (meaning it crash when you don’t expect it) but I must say that this kind of behavior is now concentrated on the designer part.  For example MonoDevelop sometimes crash when I »m manipulating some widgets, generally Notebooks widget in my case.

To conclude I heard somewhere (don’t remember exactly where though so don’t take it as a absolute truth ) (it has been announced officially) that some developpers of SharpDevelop were now working on MonoDevelop, so we can expect some cool new features in MonoDevelop in the future (why not for example some addins backport from SharpDevelop).