New versions of Gtk#, MonoDevelop and MonoDoc have been released.Gtk# is available from Gtk# home page and MonoDoc 0.13 is available from go-mono’s download page.
Gtk# now features [ConnectBefore] attribute for hooking up signals; An automake/autoconf setup; the System.Drawing dependency has been dropped and many more docs.
Version 0.2 of the MonoDevelop IDE has been released. New features include integrated support for MonoDoc, a documentation browser for Mono, GTK#, and assorted other libraries, and the Mono debugger, finally allowing people to stop printing values to find out where problems in their code lie.
Great! Now we can skip the 0.1 ebuild that still hasn’t made it in Gentoo
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43816
If you don’t see a package in portage, there is likely to be an ebuild in bugzilla.
I am a java developer and wanted to look closer at Mono. I didn’t find the documentation that good and did not want to or have time to resolve all the dependencies that are involved to install Mono by hand. I thought the best way to start would be to install Red Carpet, which I never had used before. But it was not especially convenient either. I use SUSE 8.2 and I could find packages, but Red Carpet could still not install everything involved. Especially annoying was that the documentation required a special documentation reader, which I could not get installed correctly! I think the java approach, with javadoc readable in any web browser is much much better.
I will probably look closer at Mono when they have made it easier to get started. But it feels too complicated at the moment (no I am not willing to spend hours just to get an environment working)
With Fedora Core 1 I got everything installed within minutes today. I used Red Carpet, selected mono/monodoc/gtk-sharp and it got the rest via dependencies. I went to a console and wrote a hello world application in seconds.
If you google monodoc, the first result is http://www.go-mono.com:8080/, which is a version of the mono documentation readable in any web browser. The advantage of the GTK# monodoc app is that it allows users to contribute to the documenation.
I actually did spend the time to find all dependencies etc, however I have to say I’m uncertain what to do.
I can write Java code quite easily. I have not done C# before. I am quite interested in the Java-Gnome project and think it is very useful, but then again so is GTK#. Problem I have is that I ‘feel’ that Java will not be very popular is Linux because Sun won’t open up the license (I don’t personally care about the source, and don’t ‘care’ about the other implementations of libraries). Then again, Mono is based on M$ technologies, even though C# appears to be a nice programming language.
So what can you do? Is someone actually ‘winning’ this race?
PS. No, I don’t want to write Java so it runs in a .NET managed environment
PPS. No C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, ObjectiveC, Pascal, Lisp etc
I hope in future Mono .NET will be the most popular development platform in Linux.
“I hope in future Mono .NET will be the most popular development platform in Linux.”
So does BillG, Ballmer and friends.
Weird way of appreciating a development platform. It come’s form here, so it’s obviously bad…