> From: mono-devel-list-boun...@lists.ximian.com [mailto:mono-devel-list-
> boun...@lists.ximian.com] On Behalf Of Martin Thwaites
> 
> As a side question, what is the tool that the rest of you use to develop
> mono? do you develop on windows or on Linux?

I spent some time on this not long ago, and it's rather frequent that we hear 
questions from people who want to develop mono sources, having trouble getting 
it to build, or attaching debugger to it, etc.  You *might* not be far off, 
getting it to build in VS, but for a while now, there's been a steady stream of 
people (including myself) who started by asking the same question, and before 
too long, found it easier to adapt to the system instead of the other way 
around.  I know I didn't try too hard, and I don't know if anyone else has.  So 
it *might* be easy-ish, or it might be an insurmountable obstacle.

There has been some talk about improving the build process, making it easier to 
adopt new developers, and it seems that Miguel is diving into it, but more for 
the purpose of untangling some mess and making the process more reliable, less 
for the sake of making it easier for new devs.  Lots of times, improvements 
come out of efforts like those, as a positive side effect, but it's yet to be 
seen.

I will say:  Getting monodevelop (xamarin studio) to work on windows is 
trivial.  But in order to do some good debugging, you'll want to build the 
sources too.  And as you're discovering, that's a little tougher on windows.

Getting XS on mac is trivial.  Installing mono MDK on mac is trivial.  Building 
mono for the first time required a little bit of prep (XCode, command line 
tools, homebrew, autoconf, automake, libtool).  But after that, building on the 
mac and developing in XS is quite nice.  (Sorry, no resharper...  XS isn't as 
good as VS, but XS is quite good nonetheless.)

If you don't have a mac, I'll encourage at least a *little* bit of effort 
getting windows to build - via cygwin, not the sln.

But unfortunately, you're going to have to lower your expectations.  I find, 
even when I have everything working, there are lots of shortcomings in 
debugging.  Like...  I create some class or call some method.  I step into.  
And the debugger goes to outerspace.  Or I step into, and when I get there, all 
the code is grayed out and I cannot inspect any variables, but if I'm lucky, I 
can at least continue stepping.  Sometimes can't.  And various little weird 
behaviors like that.  And every time you make a change, you have to "make" 
again.  There goes 5min to 30min, depending on what you changed.


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