Got Mono?

This week, a lot of new shiny Mono tools were released. Mono has always been something on the edge of my awareness, but I haven’t really had the time to get into it fully, in part because the tooling was… “incomplete”. I don’t mean that as an insult; merely that for most Windows devs, Visual Studio would be more attractive.

First: I’d better clarify my position. I really like Visual Studio; it works great for most of what I need – but with some cross-platform open source projects under my belt, and being aware of the common “community” (stackoverflow etc) questions about cross-platform, I now many of the pain points. I’m happy that both set of tools can co-exist without anyone getting upset.

The main time I started getting into Mono was for protobuf-net – I've had a lot of positive feedback from people pleased that it works on Mono, but my tooling for testing it on Mono has always been poor.

Step up MonoDevelop; with the new 2.2 release, IMO this actually starts to become a reasonable proposition for regular development (maybe not winforms…). With support for (among others) ASP, ASP.NET MVC, Moonlight and Gtk# – and inbuilt SVN and NUnit support it shouldn’t be dismissed. I’m in the process of ensuring that protobuf-net works (and passes the tests) in both IDEs. There are also spikes around that show Android development on MonoDevelop.

Additionally, Mono 2.6 introduces much better support on a wide range of APIs – most notably borrowing the Silverlight WCF stack, and things like the DLR. My only problem now is figuring out how much “old” Mono to support. I’m quite tempted to make 2.6 my new baseline, for simplicity.

Of course, that isn’t all – with MonoTouch for iPhone, and Mono Tools for Visual Studio, the Mono eco-system is truly starting to come into its own. I plan on spending a lot more time getting to know it more than I already do, and have proposed a session to present at ddd8. Interesting changes.