I’ve been pretty slow in blogging about this but it’s still worth pointing out that MonoDevelop 1.0 has officially been released. It’s becoming a really feature rich and mature piece of software now and is definitely worth investigation if you do any development on a Linux platform.
Roll on 1.1 in six months time!
I’m stoked. With the release of MonoDevelop 0.14 my class and member selectors are finally in the core MonoDevelop. I know it’s only a small contribution, but personally it’s a feature I find very useful so I hope other people are deriving some benefit from that work too. I do notice that most of the screen shots of MD I see have them enabled so I guess it’s not annoying people enough to turn it off!
Anyway, here is my little claim to fame:
http://www.monodevelop.com/Release_notes_for_MonoDevelop_0.14
Been a busy week so far and Anthea and I are off to Porto for the weekend tomorrow. Really looking forward to what will hopefully be a relaxing trip out of London. I’m planning on bringing back more than a couple of bottles of port as well 😉
We went to Ben Harper on Tuesday night. It was a really amazing gig and he played for 2 1/2hrs which is pretty much unheard of these days. I would definately see him again if I have the opportunity.
I got some really good feed back on my MonoDevelop patch from Lluis. I got most of the bugs fixes finished on Monday evening, but he also suggested a couple of cool new features so I probably won’t get the next version of the patch ready until next week now. I’m still hoping to have it submitted before I go to LugRadio live the following weekend. There’s no hope of doing any work on f-spot in the near term though.
And all to quickly. Managed to cram a lot into the last couple of days however. Got up early on Saturday morning to watch New Zealand crush Australia in the rugby. Go the AB’s! It was fun as we had a bunch of friends around and cooked up a massive feed of bacon, banana and maple syrup on French toast.
Saturday afternoon I did some hacking on MonoDevelop and managed to finish my patch to add the class and method combos. I submitted that last night so will be interested to see what people think.
Sunday we went to Box for the day to visit Anthea’s Aunt and Uncle. It was a nice day out and good to see them. I did some hacking on f-spot on the bus on the way up and back, but all I managed to do was frustrate myself immensely. I think I need to jump on to #f-spot tonight and try and catch llewing to see if he can help.
Spent the last couple of evenings updating some work I did on MonoDevelop ages ago but never got round to submitting. The internals of MonoDevelop have really changed since I first wrote my code so I had to spend a couple of hours updating it to work with the new version of MonoDevelop from SVN.
I then realised that I hadn’t quite got it right last time as the method combo would only show the methods the class had when the file was opened. i.e. if you added a new method it wouldn’t show up in the combo until you closed and reopened the file. With some helpful pointers from Lluis on #monodevelop last night I think I have just about solved that problem by hooking into the IParseInformationChanged event. This event fires with every key stroke. With a bit of GLib.Timeout goodness to stop the combos being rebound every time the event fires we are almost there…
Finally managed to get an hour or so of hacking in tonight. I’m trying to figure out how to use the nonlinear least squares minimisation in the GNU Scientific Library. It’s pretty tricky and I think it may take a while before I get it sussed out.
I’m hoping to get some time to finish hacking on my changes to the SourceEditorDisplayBinding class in MonoDevelop. This will add the drop down select boxes for jumping to a method definition in code.
Maybe I might get some time for this on Sunday…
So it’s been a while since I posted. I’ve been pretty busy with life and work over the last few weeks. A lot has happened since the bombings here in London, but I still find myself thinking about them alot.
We had a great weekend in the sunshine last weekend. London put on a great day on Saturday and we had an awesome picnic in Battersea park as a bit of a farewell to a couple of our housemates who are moving on.
I’ve been busy hacking too. I have been working on some new functionality for MonoDevelop and hope to get that incorporated into the next release. I have more ideas but lack the time. You can see some of the efforts of my recent hacking in this picture. The drop down on the left above the source window displays all the classes in the current file, the expanded drop down on the right displays all the members, properties and methods. Selecting one of these will jump you to the appropriate location in source.
I’m also hoping to get some time to get back to hacking on my vision project which I have neglected for far to long now.
I installed the new builds of mono and monodevelop last week and having used them a little over the last couple of days I can say they are pretty neat so far.
I haven’t used any of the new features in mono (since 1.1.4) but it does seem to be a little faster, and also fixed a nagging problem I had where everytime I rebooted my machine I had to delete my ~/.wapi directory before I could build/run any mono application.
Monodevelop is looking a little more polished since the 5.1 release. It also runs on 64bit native mono at last which I am totally stoked about! I also installed a (experimental) plugin for svn integration that had been posted to the monodevelop mailing list and this looks promising, although the history functionality crashes monodevelop on my machine (I suspect this may be to do with the version of svnlib I have installed). My only complaints at the moment are that it is a little unstable and seems to crash unexpectly (I’m planning to figure this out and submit a bug report at some stage), and the lack of C# 2.0 syntax support. I am using generics pretty heavily in my current project and including this syntax totally breaks code completion.
Monodevelop is a pretty promising IDE and a great project which I would love to contribute to, if only I had a little more time!
In slightly unrelated geekage, I finally got round to setting up some samba shares on my home network last weekend. So now my house mates can all stream mp3s, video etc from my machine via the wifi network. It’s pretty cool having Linux, Mac and Windows machines all interoperating nicely togeather!
It’s never easy thats for sure. I made the fateful decision the other day to upgrade my Mono installation. Why you say? Well I was seduced by the new language features, partial types, etc so I took the plunge and checked out the latest version from SVN.
Well, that went ok (surprisingly) and I now have Mono-1.1.2.99 installed on my machine. Unfortunately when I started Monodevelop things started to go distinctly astray 
I checked the latest version of Monodevelop out from SVN and after quite a few headaches (upgrading to gtk-sharp-2.0, trying to persuade gecko-sharp to compile against gtk-sharp-2.0… the list goes on!) I managed to get it to build, install and run!
Of course as soon as I opened a c# file it crashed… sigh.
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