MonoDevelop ASP.NET MVC on the Mac
After releasing a preview of the ASP.NET MVC MonoDevelop addin, I decided to try it on the Mac.
Although the MonoDevelop 2.0 release on the Mac is still an alpha, it's a lot better on the Mac than 1.0 was. Other than a couple of GTK+ redraw issues, the major remaining problems are mostly to do with lack of Mac integration, such as Ctrl-Click, top-level menu bar and Mac-like keyboard shortcuts. Making MonoDevelop completely supported on the Mac is one of our targets for MonoDevelop 2.2.
I downloaded the Mono 2.4 Mac installer and MonoDevelop 2.0 Mac installer (beware, alpha release) then followed exactly the same steps from my earlier Linux-based walkthrough, and apart from a couple of harmless warnings during installation of the addin, it worked flawlessly!
Since none on the MD team is familiar with Macs, contributions from Mac users would be most welcome, including testing and feedback about how to make it feel more Mac-like.
Comments
Mac user with years of Windows and .NET experience ;)
I'm an old Windows user and .NET programmer and recent Mac user. I would love to see some working, "native" tools for .NET for a Mac. Using parallels isn't the best idea for everyday use I think. I did play with Mono for some time in the past, I even released the first Mono package for Nokia 770! I'm not a pro maybe but sure like to help - especially that it's would be also very good for me to have tools for .NET programming on my Mac.
So if something would have to be tested - I would love to help - and now you know where to find me.
Where do we go to offer advice and help?
I'd love to see these tools mature and become more mac-like - but there's no link in your article showing us where we can go to provide this feedback and assistance.
Mailing lists and Bugzilla
Discussions take place on the MonoDevelop mailing list (there's a forum-like interface on the Mono site).
To make sure we keep track of things, it's best to file bugs.
Requests
Big thing is mac shortcuts like you said. Other than that, for mvc we really need a restart debugging button like visual studio has. Otherwise great work!
We don't have that on Linux yet!
The Mono debugger doesn't yet support debugging ASP.NET, so we don't have this on Linux. This should be fixed soon. However, it doesn't run on Mac either, which is a bigger obstacle, and I don't know of anyone actively working on that.
Just found your addin whilst
Just found your addin whilst on break at work.
I've not played with Mono yet (We use Windows/VS2008 here) but the addin seemed to break the project creation on my Mac (I VNC back home).
Only other thing I can think of to make it more Mac-like other than what you have described is perhaps change the icons and general look at feel. This will probably take some time though the Omnigroup seem to be good at it I think if you look at their applications.
I hope to see MD 2.2 in all it's glory... until I see what .net 4 has to offer (enhanced Entity Framework!) :D
What was the error?
I'm curious what the error was. Did you restart MD after installing the addin?
Icons and the theme will be tricky, as we lack artists...
I had some creation errors
I had some creation errors when I installed the addin (probably the same as yours, I should have noted them down). But ignore me, I think I had a little arrow prob on the new project dialog. It seems it works fine :)
I'm no artist either but it isn't exactly high priority. My highest priority for Mac MD is the menu bar and shortcuts from first glance at the app.
Although, I don't usually see Mac apps in this kind of "MDI" form. I did expect to see some kind of Xcode interface. I may look into it myself if noone is working on it as it would open up the ability to be multimonitor friendly. Just throwing out ideas anyway :)
I can continue to work on my MVC site now then. Sorry for any alarm!
I'm glad it's working for you!
I'm glad it's working for you!
MD trunk is shaping up quite nicely for Mac, with main menus, keybindings, associations and stuff like that. I'll be doing a preview release soon.
The MDI stuff is trickier, but doable, since MD has workbench abstractions in place. It's not something I'll be working on, but it you want to look at it, I'd be happy to give you some pointers.
Awesome and timely
This is really very cool. I used to also be a .NET developer, but I lost faith in Windows and switched back the Mac quite a few years ago. Doing the Parallels or VMWare thing was not easy. In fact, it was downright frustrating. I sort of just gave up on developing .NET stuff and started focusing more on Ruby development (which is still my main thing).
However, I was recently awarded a project that will utilize Telligent's Community Server and their Graffiti CMS package. Some of the requirements for the site may require a bit of custom .NET integration and some Chalk extensions (Graffiti's templating language). Thank you so much for the obvious blessing. This is really sweet. :-)