A few week ago, I travelled to GDC and MIX. While in planes, airports and in spare moments in the conference, I implemented a feature I've wanted for some time - integrated T4 templating. This takes the T4 engine that I wrote for ASP.NET MVC templates, and exposed it within the IDE as a "custom tool", like Visual Studio does.
This also meant I had to implement a simple version of VS-style custom tools, or generators. Set the file's "custom tool" property to "TextTemplatingFileGenerator" using the property pad, then whenever you save it, MD will run the generator on the file.
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.
