[Cocoa-sharp] [Recap] The State of the Art

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

   So to recap:

> Mono has a debugger

   We have a debugger, but it is not complete, Martin is working
furiously towards "Milestone I", which is documented here:

	http://www.mono-project.com/Debugger#Feature_list

   There are still a number of rough edges and features missing for
completing Milestone I, and only then we will move to the second stage:
IDE integration, anonymous method support and new ports.

    Simply because the debugger is not ready.

> Mono has an IDE

    There are three options for an IDE today:

	* MonoDevelop with Gtk# on top of Gtk+ on top of X11.
	  Only offers Gtk# designer right now.

	  Not yet a 1.0 product

	* X-Develop, commercial IDE, works fairly well, offers 
	  auto-complete and even Winforms and Gtk+ form designers
	  and might also do ASP.NET.

	* X-Code integration, the components contributed, it will
	  blend with your OSX toolchain but does not provide things
	  like intellisense.

	  The plugin is not yet a 1.0 product.

    From a practical standpoint, I would use X-Develop if am building a
commercial project today.   If you are more adventurous there are a
number of things you can do:

	* Help on the Gtk/OSX effort from Immendio to get a native
	  Gtk# running on OSX.

	  They need help with code, themes and keybindings to make it
	  look and feel like OSX (yes, it wont be 1:1, but it can be 
	  made close enough).

	* Help the X-Code effort to get things like intellisense,
	  refactor some code from MonoDevelop and embed Mono or run it
	  out-of-proc for those features.

	  This is a lot of work, but it is doable.

For the remaining issues, we do need bug reports on bugzilla, and we
will try to address those issues.

We are currently resource strapped.  I wish we had a team of a hundred
JIT developers and class library developers, but we do not have them.

On the upside: we are hiring a JIT developer, if you think you want to
hack on it, drop me an email.

Miguel.