[Mono-dev] Compiling mono on windows for developing (not running)

[Edward Ned Harvey (mono)]

> From: mono-devel-list-bounces at lists.ximian.com [mailto:mono-devel-list-
> bounces at lists.ximian.com] On Behalf Of Martin Thwaites
> 
> As a side question, what is the tool that the rest of you use to develop
> mono? do you develop on windows or on Linux?

I spent some time on this not long ago, and it's rather frequent that we hear questions from people who want to develop mono sources, having trouble getting it to build, or attaching debugger to it, etc.  You *might* not be far off, getting it to build in VS, but for a while now, there's been a steady stream of people (including myself) who started by asking the same question, and before too long, found it easier to adapt to the system instead of the other way around.  I know I didn't try too hard, and I don't know if anyone else has.  So it *might* be easy-ish, or it might be an insurmountable obstacle.

There has been some talk about improving the build process, making it easier to adopt new developers, and it seems that Miguel is diving into it, but more for the purpose of untangling some mess and making the process more reliable, less for the sake of making it easier for new devs.  Lots of times, improvements come out of efforts like those, as a positive side effect, but it's yet to be seen.

I will say:  Getting monodevelop (xamarin studio) to work on windows is trivial.  But in order to do some good debugging, you'll want to build the sources too.  And as you're discovering, that's a little tougher on windows.

Getting XS on mac is trivial.  Installing mono MDK on mac is trivial.  Building mono for the first time required a little bit of prep (XCode, command line tools, homebrew, autoconf, automake, libtool).  But after that, building on the mac and developing in XS is quite nice.  (Sorry, no resharper...  XS isn't as good as VS, but XS is quite good nonetheless.)

If you don't have a mac, I'll encourage at least a *little* bit of effort getting windows to build - via cygwin, not the sln.

But unfortunately, you're going to have to lower your expectations.  I find, even when I have everything working, there are lots of shortcomings in debugging.  Like...  I create some class or call some method.  I step into.  And the debugger goes to outerspace.  Or I step into, and when I get there, all the code is grayed out and I cannot inspect any variables, but if I'm lucky, I can at least continue stepping.  Sometimes can't.  And various little weird behaviors like that.  And every time you make a change, you have to "make" again.  There goes 5min to 30min, depending on what you changed.