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Back in May, I was wrapping PhyreEngine and porting the samples to C#. To extend one of them and demonstrate some of the capabilities of C#, Miguel and I decided to use simple iterator-based microthreading, which simulates multithreading but with many microthreads within a single real thread. Unity does something like it in their game engine too. It enables you to use a very imperative style of coding, as if using a single dedicated thread for each, but without anywhere near the overhead of real threads.

In this follow-up to my post on turning a GTK# app into a Mac app bundle, I describe how to integrate your application with Mac-specific features such as the main menu, the dock, and file/URL events. This is based on the work I did to integrate MonoDevelop and MonoDoc with the Mac, and largely involves cherry-picking code snippets from these projects. Although it would be nice to isolate this code into a library, I don't have the time at the moment to maintain such a library myself.

While making the MonoDevelop and MonoDoc packages for Mac I learned a few things about adapting GTK# apps for Mac, and I'd like to share them so that anyone else who's built a GTK# app on Windows or Linux can provide a nice self-contained Mac app bundle for their Mac users. This first part will cover building an app bundle, and a later post will cover building platform-specific code paths so that your app integrates with the main menu and dock.

It's strange to think that's it's 2010 already and I haven't blogged since June. It certainly hasn't been for lack of things to blog about — if anything, I've been too busy working on things to blog about them, so whenever I've had something to share I've usually used Twitter because much easier to fire off a quick tweet than to write a blog post. However, I'm determined to start blogging again so that I can share detailed information to which I can refer people more easily.

So, over the next few weeks, I'm going to try to catch up a bit. I intend to blog about the following topics:

• Binding techniques for C++ libraries, based on what I learned from PhyreEngine
• A tiny library I wrote for simulating cooperative microthreading using IEnumerable
• The IPhone addin for MonoDevelop as an example of a custom project type
• An update on building Moonlight projects with MonoDevelop
• Some of the new features in MonoDevelop 2.2 and trunk
• Turning a GTK# application into a Mac app bundle and integrating with the dock and main menu
• The Mono.TextTemplating T4 library I developed for MonoDevelop's ASP.NET MVC addin
• The talk I gave on MonoDevelop at MonoSpace
• The difference between Web Applications and Web Sites, and why MonoDevelop only supports the former
• Plans for improving the file/project templating system in MonoDevelop
• Some of the photographs I've taken over the past 6 months

I don't have any particular order planned, so if there's something you'd particularly like to see, leave a comment and I'll try to take it into consideration. I'll link the items in the list through to the posts as I make them.

In the Microsoft XNA EULA, I found the following restriction:

You may not use the software to develop programs that run on any platform other than the Windows, Zune or Xbox 360 platforms

I'm no lawyer, but this sounds like very poor wording. Does this mean that all source code developed with XNA Game Studio is restricted to use on those platforms, in perpetuity? That would mean that it couldn't even be used on a future, new Microsoft platform!

This seems to me to be unreasonable and probably unenforceable.

Yesterday I announced much-improved MonoDevelop preview builds for Mac, which include ASP.NET MVC support out-of-the-box. However, there was a little surprise in that build that I didn't mention — full support for building and running Silverlight projects using a bundled copy of the Moonlight SDK.

I created a screencast to show off how easy this makes it to develop Silverlight apps on the Mac:

The past few weeks I've been working on improving the MonoDevelop experience on the Mac, making it integrate better with the Mac experience. Along with ASP.NET MVC support and other soon-to be-announced excitement, I think this makes MonoDevelop much more interesting for Mac users.

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.

Last week, Miguel, Joseph and I went to the GDC again to promote the use of Mono as a runtime for games. I may write about that at a later time.

The past month or two, in addition to bugfixing for our recent MonoDevelop 2.0 release, I've been quietly hacking on a MonoDevelop Addin to support writing ASP.NET MVC applications. Those of you following me on Twitter may have picked up a few hints...

Now that Microsoft has released ASP.NET MVC under the MS-Pl licence, I'm making a preview release of the ASP.NET MVC addin for people who'd like to start playing with this exciting new tech on Mono. It's relatively immature, so don't expect everything to work perfectly, but it handles creating and running a VS-compatible ASP.NET MVC project just fine.