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Recently Miguel announced MonoMac, a new Mono binding for Cocoa & other Objective-C libraries, based on the MonoTouch binding generator and Objective-C bridge.

This is exciting for many people because it allows writing native Mac GUIs using C# and other .NET languages. I have put together a MonoDevelop addin that simplifies the process of creating, developing and debugging a MonoMac application.

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.

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.