Hello, I would like to thank all the people that are turning mono into a very desirable multi-platform run-time/platform. I have used Java/JDK for many years, as a mobile/embedded developer i pretty much had no choice. Lately i have turned my attention to mono, since the 2.0 release many exciting features have been implemented and the 2.2 release also has some very interesting features that i would like to experiment with (SIMD, etc...). So kudos on the excellent job so far and looking at the roadmap things look very exciting for next year also.
Now comes the "hopefully" constructive criticism: Having a run-time that is multi-platform, should mean having also top quality multi-platform development environments (It took Sun Microsystems almost a decade to get there, but i have to congratulate them on finally getting the multi-platform development environment fixed, via the Netbeans IDE). Sadly this is not the reality, Windows is clearly a second hand citizen on the mono ecosystem, i can understand that having a very strong and solid MS .NET development environment on the Windows platform can look like a Goliath vs David situation, but there is a clear interest by Windows developers on mono, only bound to grow as we get more goodies that are not available on ms.net. However these developers are faced with very little support in terms of tooling and having a mature platform to develop, test and debug mono applications. I am always a bit disappointed to see great open source projects fail in packing their product and creating support channels. MySQL, SugarCRM, and a few other being the exception. So in this regard, what can windows developer do to get a top notch mono development environment on the windows platform?! Looking at the two main "mono IDEs" monodevelop, and sharpdevelop, we are faced by a very irritating fact. No default support for mono on windows paltform. SharpDevelop3.0 does not feature native mono support ( http://community.sharpdevelop.net/blogs/laputa/archive/2008/01/02/sharpdevelop-3-where-did-mono-and-nant-support-go.aspx ), since monodevelop is supposed to be released on the Windows platform ( http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Dec-02-2.html ), but since the windows monodevelop port is not in good shape Windows developers are left with a big void. The GSoC VS add-ins are a nice effort, but insufficient, if the mono project is really serious about being a multi-platform run-time, it needs to have primetime development tool on all the supported platforms. There is nothing that i hate more than to use different IDEs to basically do the same thing, resulting in having to learn 3 different tools, 3 different UIs just because there is no decent multi-platform development environment for my multi-platform run-time. I used to have to do that on Java, until NetBeans and the JDK LnF became truly multi-platform, simple, easy to use, and allowed me to gain allot in terms of productivity, it did not matter what i was running underneath (Win/Linux/Mac/BSD) as long as i had the JDK and NetBeans i could simply "get to work", i hope the mono project and monodevelop moves in a similar direction. Sorry for the long rant, in the end I will have to boot to Ubuntu and work with monodevelop there, since it is well supported. I hate to do it, but i don't really see any option to get the same level of support under win. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Some-constructive-criticism-from-a-Windows-developer.-tp20384044p20384044.html Sent from the Mono - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [email protected] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
