MonoDevelop - Pure Awesome!

I've always been a little envious of Java developers since they could essentially write their code and then run it on any device. It might not be a perfect translation each time, but its still much better than what a pure .NET dev could put together.

I recently started doing some iPhone development and decided to investigate MonoTouch. I downloaded the a copy of MonoDevelop (which is still in beta at this time) and installed it. After starting up the application I was shocked to see what came up...

Uh... what? Wow! Is this for real? This really looks pretty nice!

Not What You'd Expect

When you first mess with the IDE you'll be pleased to see it works just like you'd hope. Intellisense is quick and accurate; Syntax highlighting works as you would expect; Believe me when I say, it is just that impressive.

But having a pretty IDE is nice but it doesn't mean anything if the language doesn't work the way you need it to. Honestly, I figured it had to be some sort of watered-down version of the same .NET C# language that I work with every day. The first thing I did was hack out something that was certain to fail... but...

Incredible! Granted this isn't that hard of code, who would have thought so much was already available!

And that isn't all - You have LINQ support, Generics... heck, even ASP.NET MVC is already packed in here!!

Not only that, but check out this "little" dialog. I'm sure it doesn't mean much...

If I'm reading this correctly, we can import existing .NET assemblies - How awesome would that be! (but I'm just guessing here... I'll test it later...)

See It To Believe It

Mono and MonoDevelop are going to open up a lot of existing C#/Windows devs to an entirely new world. Don't just take my word for it though -- try it out for yourself. It doesn't take a lot of effort, download a copy of VirtualBox and setup a virtual instance of another OS and prepare to be impressed.

Great job Mono Team! I think the benefits of .NET cross-platform development are yet to be realized!