Let’s say for instance that you want to enable at compile time a specific feature in your project. Now what you can do is add a switch to your deployment project which will be turned in something like --enable-super-feature on configure side (i.e. you will be able to run configure like ./configure --enable-super-feature).

This will actually define (as in #define) a symbol that you can use with #if … #endif constructs in your code to activate your specific feature.

Since we are at it, here is a little screenie :

I will add support asap for simple makefile projects. The UI is also probably a bit rough, if there are any usability expert out of there I will gladly accept any sensible criticism .

After poking and modifying some stuff in Double.cs the problem was remaining. So, I made a really simple test case that I pasted below :

using System;

class DoubleFormatTestCase
{
  public static void Main()
  {
	Console.WriteLine(double.Parse("12.68"));
  }
}

Compiling it and running it on my machine threw the same exception that in Monodevelop. I admit this puzzled me completely as I was thinking that, programming language speaking, floating numbers were always represented like this in their textual form.

After asking in #mono, yakeen suggested replacing the simple double.Parse(string) with double.Parse(string, CultureInfo) like this :

using System;
using System.Globalization;
class DoubleFormatTestCase
{
  public static void Main()
  {
	Console.WriteLine(double.Parse("12.68",
                    CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.NumberFormat));
  }
} 

And if you try this code it should work no matter your platform or your language.

Why that ? Because as you should know (and as I should have remembered ) .NET/Mono enforces that things like string comparisons, DateTime handling or long.Parse (in our case) are made according to the user culture. Indeed, here in France, when we write floating numbers, we use ‘,’ and not ‘.’ to separate the integer and floating part. This syntax difference explained why long.Parse(string) was borking on my system.

You can also re-run the first test like this : LANG=en_EN mono DoubleFormatTestCase.exe. Normally it should run without problem.

The moral of the story : always use double.Parse(string, System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.NumberFormat); instead of double.Parse(string) when doing conversion between string and double in a persistent way (configuration files, intern calculations) and only use the latter when you have to exchange with the user.

Btw, with big kudos to yakeen, I submitted a patch to Monodevelop to correct the problem. It should be available soon.

The announcement can be read here with the changelog there (particulary this ). Believe me, to see my insignificant feature on such a big thing makes me very very happy .

Then just follow these instructions :

• Do a fresh checkout of MonoDevelop to get the core modifications that Lluis has already commited from my patch
• Open up a terminal and go to $basedir/monodevelop/Extras/MonoDevelop.SourceEditor
• To apply the patch, execute this command : ‘wget http://netherilshade.free.fr/mono/SourceEditor.patch ; cat SourceEditor.patch | patch -p0‘
• After that go back to the root directory of Monodevelop (‘cd $basedir/monodevelop‘).
• Then, depending if you had already compiled Monodevelop previously, just type ‘make‘ or the classical ‘./autogen.sh ; make‘
• Finally you can either install Monodevelop to your system by using ‘make install‘ (under root) or simply by using ‘make run‘ which will run Monodevelop ‘in-place’ without breaking your already installed version.

If you want do disable AutoCorrection you can do it in the Preferences dialog in the Editor|General section.

(EDIT: new screencast with better scaling and fixes)

http://netherilshade.free.fr/md-screencast.ogg

It may look better it you watch it fullscreen.

(sorry for the bad quality and size but I’m not really a screencast expert )

Well, without really understanding how, I ended up coding a missing feature in MonoDevelop (in fact it’s for both compiler errors and on-the-fly parser errors). It’s not totally finished (I need to change the tooltip to show the error messages and do some polishing on the editor code) but it’s already usable :

I know that the underline isn’t really at the right place in the screenshot but, well, it’s the fault of NRefactory’s parser . Nonetheless I have to thanks Michael and Luis for their excellent comments and directions on #monodevelop, so, thanks a lot .

• Yay today I passed my last written exam for the Baccalauréat. Physics/Chemistry was terrific but I found Math easy (which is good because my final mark will depend mostly on this exam mark). Now it just let some practical and oral tests in the following week but it’s not big deal : meaning I will much more time to work on what I like .
• I found some time to add new features to Circ like a revamped parser infrastructure and now Circ take account of its conf file. I pushed my early work on the mirror but it’s still very buggy so I don’t recommend that you upgrade.
• For all Ubuntu performance tuning fan out of there you should try these set of scripts : http://gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=1397 . Basically they remove whitespaces and such from your Gnome’s XML files which improve speed launch of your app and their memory usage.
• Monodevelop 0.14 is out with all the juicy features I described there and more. Yesterday I just discovered that you can know generate automagically properties from a field via the right-click menu. Terrific
• I’m wondering what are the capabitilities of this Thrust thing and if it would run fine on Mono.Xna. Will test it when I find time.
• Tomorrow I have to go to some sort of meeting to be introduced to the job I will make during this summer. Hu who found the dumb idea to make me wake up for 9am when I just finished my exams and when I’m going to a friend’s party this evening …

• Dans à peu près deux semaines maintenant ça sera la première épreuve du Baccalauréat. J’essaie de réviser mais quand on a envie de programmer ou de lire des trucs ça devient difficile .
• Début de semaine épuisant avec un contrôle de math mardi où j’ai complètement séché sur deux questions de proba qui étaient pourtant toute conne et un bac blanc de physique mercredi après-midi où à cause de l’oubli d’un %µ£ »de prof dans la consigne je me suis cassé le c** à redémontrer une équa diff à partir du théorème de conservation de l’énergie mécanique.
• J’ai trouvé le temps de upper les photos des lycéen Finlandais qui sont venus logés chez nous la semaine dernière. Ca n’intéressera probablement pas la plupart des gens qui viennent se perdre ici mais bon à tout hasard c’est ici (au moins ça devrait faire apparaitre l’album dans Google ).
• Quel bordel quand même les cibles de déploiements dans la version actuelle de Monodevelop (svn), avec les Autotools qui foirent et les dépendances inutiles qu’ils rajoutent faut rester accrocher . J’ai posté un rapport de bug.
• Je suis passé bien à côté mais Mono est sortie en version 1.2.4 dernièrement avec les nouvelles fonctionnalités C# 3 dont j’ai parlé précédemment et d’autre goodies sympas.
• J’apparais dans le del.icio.us de quelqun oO, quand on ajoute ça au fait que à cause d’un de mes billets je me suis retrouvé presque « par accident » dans le blogroll d’un gros blog ça fait bizarre .
• Pour que ça soit définitivement bordélique on va glisser une QoTD de asmanur : « Error: Smiley overflow. » (background : le gars est un boulet notoire qui rafolent des smileys, forcément faillait bien que ça nous tappe sur le système, post accessible ici)
• Je suis en train d’écouter l’album que Jono Bacon a fait pour son oeuvre caritative du Big Red Recording. C’est vraiment très bien avec des chansons douces, du métal bien dur, le tout en moins de 48H . N’attendez plus allez les télécharger –> http://www.recreantview.org/blog/?p=117
]]> http://blog.neteril.org/2007/05/17/capharnaum-lycee/feed/ 0 http://blog.neteril.org/2007/04/28/some-new-stuff-on-monodevelop-svn/ http://blog.neteril.org/2007/04/28/some-new-stuff-on-monodevelop-svn/#comments Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:17:57 +0000 Jérémie Laval http://garuma.wordpress.com/2007/04/28/some-new-stuff-on-monodevelop-svn/ 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).

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