[Mono-osx] Use of Eclipse as a .NET IDE

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

    Some people have mentioned that SlickEdit works on the Mac.  There
is also X-Code which is a commercial IDE that supports Mono natively and
works on OSX, uses SWT so it has *some* resemblance to the underlying OS
and I believe its based to some extent on Eclipse.

    The Mono team does not have the resources to build an IDE, so we
have not devoted much attention to that problem ourselves.  Although we
do contribute to MonoDevelop.

    We contribute to MonoDevelop for several reasons:

	* It is a good way of testing the Mono runtime *itself* as it is
	  a large application and it exercises various parts of the
	  runtime that would otherwise would not be tested.

	  ie, we dogfood Mono and Gtk# with it.

	* A C#-based IDE is able to consume all of our class libraries
	  without any effort, this means that it is easy to integrate 
	  the Mono debugger (done in the past, currently broken as its
	  changing its API), Stetic or other Gtk# based components
	  easily.

     To me dogfooding is a recent good enough to support MonoDevelop as
a gigantic QA test for the runtime and all of our libraries.  But if
folks wants to use X-Code, Eclipse or SlickEdit that is of course fine
with us.  We just do not have enough resources to have a strong enough
opinion.

Miguel.