[Mono-osx] MacPack Oddness

[Ken & Deb Allen]

I have been experimenting with Mono and the windows framework, and it  
is far from ready for general use on MacOS X! I use .Net primarily  
for work, and find it a great environment for development (highly  
productive), even the mono tools there are not too bad. From what I  
have read, some of the linux tools are not too bad, but from what I  
can see one must go through hoops to get anything other than the  
basic Mono package installed.

MacOS seems to be last in the race, with few, if any, of the GUI  
tools actually working at all. So, for MacOS, no IDE and no  
functional debugger and really no code assistance either. But at  
least I had hoped to be able to take  most of the code developed in  
Windows and bring it over, only having to create a build script for it.

Not much luck with that. It generally works, but the GUI stuff is not  
nearly ready for real use, and some crashes of working .Net code are  
frequent. On the other hand, the Cocoa# stuff is just too much manual  
work.

I really have to say that Microsoft has produced three (3) things  
(and only these three) that I admire: SQL Server; .Net; and Visual  
Studio .Net -- I find that productivity in these environments is well  
and above others that I have worked in before and continue to do so.  
XCode is great, but the Cocoa environment is missing some things that  
are absolutely necessary for work that I do (if I had the equivalent  
to the DataSet, DataTable, etc. classes in the Cocoa/XCode  
environment, I would be extremely happy -- but the objective-C code  
is not portable.

Mono/.Net have excited me for some time, but I am not going to be  
able to use mono for heavy lifting for some time to come. I saw from  
another posting that we may see MonoDevelop available when the next  
MacOS X release is generally available, and that would be great; that  
and improvements to MWF should permit me to make more effective use  
of mono.

Sorry for the diversion: now for the problem I have been seeing.

The macpack facility creates a 'package' for me that permits double- 
clicking of generated programs, which is great, and permits the  
windowing stuff to work, which is even better. The down side is that  
every time I exit my program I get an alert that indicates that "The  
application mono quit unexpectedly." I do ot know why this is  
happening, but it would be nice if I could make it stop!


-ken