Cocoa: Mono (C#)... 4 years later

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Mono (C#)... 4 years later

It's been 4 years since I first started looking at C# and in particular Mono. Since January 2005, I took a course on C#.NET and even worked on a project or two, but I can't seriously claim that I'm a big .NET guy (yet). I continued to work in Java and a whole lot more with Ruby and Rails (thanks to JRuby). But just like I said 4 years ago, I'm a pragmatist about these things. Since Calgary seems to be moving to C#, I figured I should probably take a look at the lay of the C#.NET land again.

I'm still a Mac-toting fan boy and don't really want to pay for a Microsoft OS license or pay for their IDE so Mono is the only game for me. So I headed over to the Mono website. I was ecstatic to see that MonoDevelop finally works on a Mac. So I downloaded the latest Mono runtime and the latest beta of MonoDevelop. I installed both without a hitch and proceeded to build an ASP.NET MVC webapp in just a few minutes. No fuss, no muss, it just worked... Very cool.

I still work in Rails most days and in my spare time I continue to work through an iPhone App development course so Mono isn't going to get a lot of attention for a little while, but it's out of the fridge and on the back burner...

3 comments:

harald said...: do you use any gui builder for c#/mono apps? i would be interested in this, because afaik monodevelop on osx still does not include the stetic gui builder. i've also tried glade, but i did not get it to work on osx.

thanks!; 9/28/2009 12:44 a.m.
sundog said...: Hi Aurora. I typically build webapps so no I don't use a gui builder. But I did some investigation anyway. Apparently MonoDevelop for Mac doesn't bundle the GUI Builder because of a number of bugs in the underlying GTK+ framework with respect to drag and drop on the Mac. Bug reports have been submitted so hopefully they'll be addressed at some point in the future.; 9/29/2009 7:07 a.m.
karbon said...: Hey, take a look at a MonoTouch(http://monotouch.net/). It's mono for the iPod/iPhone. Also, GUI builder and all of that cool stuff.; 11/30/2009 7:53 p.m.