The document switcher is a quick way to switch focus between open documents and pads using the keyboard. It's activated by the Ctrl-tab or Ctrl-shift-tab combinations, and remains open as long as Control remains held down. While it's open, you can change the selection — up arrow or shift-tab moves the selection up, down arrow or tab moves the selection down, and the left and right arrows move the selection between the pads and documents lists. When you have selected the item you want, release Control, and it will be selected.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Last night I got MonoDevelop working (to some extent) on Windows Vista x64 using the Linux binaries, tweeting my progress along the way.
UPDATE: In another 5am hacking run this evening, I've managed to build MonoDevelop fully in Visual Studio 2008, and debug at all the way to the Welcome Page, using 32-bit debugging on Vista 64. However, I'm going to have to tidy the project file fixes a lot before I commit them.
I've recently been tweaking the ASP.NET completion, adding support for resolving valid children for a control. These can be properties, a property, or controls. More difficult was resolving the valid children for properties, but this is now done:
Unfortunately, there aren't actually any designer or parser attributes for limiting the children of a property, so in order to resolve the children, I assume it's a collection, and look for an Add method with a single parameter derived from Control. If this exists, I use its parameter to filter the types in the control completion list. It's an ugly hack, but it works perfectly for tables and wizards. In the worst case, MonoDevelop falls back to showing all controls.
With this done, the ASP.NET completion is essentially feature-complete.
