[Mono-osx] Xcode plugin for C#/mono

[Andreas Färber]

Hey,

>> There is no public Xcode API and there have been major method
>> signature changes between Xcode releases so a plugin written for
>> Xcode 2.4 might crash on 2.3 or 2.2 etc. So please don't install any
>> Xcode plugins as part of Mono.
>
> I find it hard to believe that Xcode is not versioned.
>
> If that is the case, what are third party developers supposed to do  
> with
> X-Code?

Them not providing any documentation is even worse than their  
changing interfaces! ;-)

For examples of breaking changes see the unofficial:
http://maxao.free.fr/xcode-plugin-interface/
His headers use #ifdefs to handle the different versions.

Not too sure how exactly he went about it but my way of gathering  
information was to take a class as starting point and iterate over  
the available methods, dumping that to the console, then in a  
subclass overriding a method to test the types and values of its  
arguments etc. It's totally unofficial, at least this native part.

Haven't found docs for AppleScript plugin development yet but that is  
the only way officially provisioned by Apple - you find it in Xcode  
under File > New Project... > Standard Apple Plug-ins > AppleScript  
Xcode Plug-in. The project template consists of an empty Objective-C  
class and an AppleScript script with an empty event handler, method  
or something (not being familiar with the language).

If you're truly interested in getting Mono somehow integrated with  
the Xcode IDE (and possibly future OS versions), then as an official  
Mono/Novell representative you might want to contact Apple directly,  
it could be worth a try - maybe they'd be supportive of the idea.  
They ship a number of different runtimes after all and aim to be  
compatible with Windows.

The Mono framework was once listed in their Mac OS X downloads  
directory (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/), though most  
recently that no longer appears to be the case, maybe the entry needs  
to be resubmitted and periodically updated? Or were they unhappy  
about not having an OS X specific about/download page to link to?

Andreas