MonoDevelop

So Mono…
Several years ago I ported a Boo WinForms .NET application to Linux using Mono. I started using MonoDevelop 1.0. What an ordeal the whole thing turned out to be. Porting was easy. There was very little that didn’t work in Mono. But it all went downhill from there.
First MonoDevelop was buggy and hard to use. There was no integrated debugger. Secondly, it used a proprietary project format so I had to maintain separate files for Linux and Windows. Eventually they ported MonoDevelop to Windows, but didn’t port the Boo Addin so I still had to maintain two sets of project files. They integrated the debugger but broke the Boo Addin on Linux (had to submit my own patch and use a locally compiled copy for a while). Then the code completion stopped working. Some of the time the debugger just does not attach and about half of the time my app would compile, run and then mysteriously close with no error.
Finally I did a dist-upgrade on Ubuntu and got the new MonoDevelop 2.6. I was sure hoping that some of my problems would be solved. Ha! That’s where I hit the end of the road. The new version came with no Boo Addin. I could no longer compile my project from the IDE. I looked in the Addin repository, but there is nothing there. They must have changed the Addin interface from 2.4 and apparently none of the Addins got ported.
Wait… I did not even talk about Mono! Maybe next post…