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The videos from NDC 2011 are now online, including my talk Developing .NET Applications for the Mac App Store (direct link). You can also download a printable version of my presentation. Hopefully there will be an official torrent of the videos soon, because there were plenty of other sessions that are worth seeing. Thanks to everyone who helped make it such a great conference!

This week I'm going to be presenting two sessions at DevTeach 11 in Montreal.

My first topic will be Native .NET Apps for the Mac with MonoMac. I'll be taking about MonoMac and the native Mac APIs that it exposes to .NET developers, and how to build native apps that can be deployed to the Mac App store. My second topic will be Using Mono for Native Apps on Mac, Android, iPhone and more. I'll be giving an overview of Mono's most exciting platform integration technologies: Mono for Android, MonoTouch (iPhone), and MonoMac. I'll also explore strategies to share and re-use code between these and other .NET platforms such as Windows, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7.

I'll also be on the DotNetRocks panel to discuss mobile platforms, and outside my talks I'll be happy to discuss any Mono-related topic, especially the technologies I've worked on — MonoDevelop, MonoTouch, Mono for Android, ASP.NET MVC, and the use of Mono in games.

In their recent update of the iOS and Mac developer tools, Apple removed the standalone Interface Builder application and integrated the GUI designer functionality directly into Xcode 4. This was a very significant change and removed several features that were necessary for MonoTouch and MonoMac to integrate with the designer. As soon as Xcode 4 went final, we started working on MonoDevelop support for integrating MonoTouch with Xcode 4's GUI designer, but it's a complex project and will take some time to complete.

I'm going to be at NDC 2011 in Oslo, and I'll be speaking about Developing .NET Applications for the Mac App Store. The talk will provide an introduction to MonoMac and the native Mac APIs that it exposes to .NET developers, explain the structure of MonoMac apps and how they can be deployed to the Mac App store, and discuss strategies for code reuse across the platforms supported by Mono and .NET.

In early February I started writing a series of MonoDevelop Tips, and after a solid run of a couple of months, I found it difficult to keep up with the challenging Mon-Tues-Weds-Thu-Fri schedule I originally set for myself, and had to take a break to catch up with all the other things I need to do. I'm building up a buffer of new posts, and I'll resume posting tips in May, on a Mon-Weds-Fri schedule.

In an earlier post, I introduced the Navigate To dialog, which allows quickly navigating to any file or type in the solution. It has a couple more useful capabilities which are not immediately obvious.

One of my favourite pads in MonoDevelop is the document outline pad, which provides an overview of the current document and a way to jump quickly to any part of it. I like to keep it autohidden on the left side of the MonoDevelop window, so that I can quickly bring it up. You can show it using the View->Pads->Document Outline menu item, and change its position and docking to fit your workspace layout.

MonoDevelop keeps track of your navigation history, like a web browser. If you jump to another file or another position inside the same file, you can easily navigate back. This is particularly useful combined with MonoDevelop's other code navigation features that make it easy to jump around your code, such as the "Go to definition" command and the Navigate To dialog. The Navigation History can get you back to wherever you were before.

Code focus is a useful feature that helps to show the structure of your code. It's activated by hovering over one of the fold markers in the text editor margin for a few seconds. The activated fold region and its parent regions are highlighted using graduated colour differences on the text editor background.

There are several different kinds of settings in MonoDevelop — Preferences, Policies and Project Options — and the distinction between them is not immediately clear. This post aims to provide an explanation of them and what they're used for.

Preferences