[Mono-osx] Mono development on OS X without a debugger? (was Re: Mono on Leopard)

[Brock Reeve]

.NET was built by Microsoft. Microsoft does a real good job with their 
development tools. When I started work in Visual Studio I was blown away. 
Intellisense, integrated debugger, watch windows, thread windows. Windows 
developers where introduced to .NET on Windows with Visual Studio. They 
fell in love with .NET and the Visual Studio experience and now are 
looking to mono for the cross platform capabilities. I feel the majority 
of the mono users are ones coming from Windows.

I am one of those users. I too am struggling with developing on the Mac 
with Mono. I think we can all agree the development experience (from a 
Windows perspective) is bad. Recently, I was experimenting with adding 
some theme support for the Windows Forms stuff on the Mac. I would build 
on windows and then run on the Mac using a shared drive and writelines to 
debug. It was a frustrating and time consuming process to hunt down issues 
(I desperately wanted to set a breakpoint). This experience soured my 
desire to contribute to the Windows Forms effort on the Mac.

I think the success of Mono is strictly tied to the development experience 
on non windows platforms. I also think the success of Mono depends on how 
well the development experience is for the Mac because I believe Mono will 
get more developers using the Mac than Linux. This is due to the rising 
popularity of the Mac and Windows developers are looking at ways to take 
their .NET skills and apps to the Mac. They (Mono) will also get more 
visibility on the Mac by having apps run well on it.

I like mono and see great potiential. I just see a gap in the development 
tools and I don't want to see this gap being labeled as ok. The mono 
community will thrive, the barrier to get started developing with mono 
tools will become lower, and more patches will be committed if the 
development tools are there. We need to build the foundation with good 
development tools.

Brock





Liam Coughlin <lscoughlin at mac.com> 
Sent by: mono-osx-bounces at lists.ximian.com
11/12/2007 01:20 PM

To
Sean Hignett <seanhig at geminibay.com>
cc
"Edward J. Sabol" <sabol at alderaan.gsfc.nasa.gov>, 
mono-osx at lists.ximian.com, stephen at devolutions.org
Subject
Re: [Mono-osx] Mono development on OS X without a debugger?     (was Re: 
Mono on Leopard)






Yes, but all of this is lame work arounds for not actually having a 
debugger on os x.

I realize that an os x debugger is not currently a priority, but 
don't pretend that mono on os x is really ready for much of anything 
until that changes.


On Nov 10, 2007, at 12:13 AM, Sean Hignett wrote:

> log4net.  it is better then a debugger because it can be toggled on or
> off at any time - even during user testing.
>
> don't leave home (or your ide) without it.
>
> On 9-Nov-07, at 9:45 PM, Edward J. Sabol wrote:
>
>> Stephen Rylander asked:
>>> Ed, I'm curious how you, or others, are making full use of Mono on
>>> OS X without a debugger? I really want to use Mono more, being an
>>> experienced C# developer, but the lack of a debugger freaks me out.
>>> I'd really appreciate any and all thoughts on the subject.
>>
>> Stephen, I know it sounds archaic, but I basically just add a 
>> bunch of
>> WriteLn's to the code until it works the way I expect. (Actually, I
>> have a
>> "Logger" class which facilitates this and writes the info to a log
>> file if
>> and only if debug mode is turned on.) As a long-time Web CGI and
>> JavaScript
>> developer, I guess I'm just kind of used to this method of
>> debugging, so it
>> doesn't bother me. I'm not sure I'd advise employing this
>> methodology with
>> GUI development though.
>>
>> If you really want a C# debugger, you could always use VMWare or
>> Parallels on
>> Mac OS X to run a Windows or Linux debugger on an as-needed basis, I
>> suppose....
>>
>> Hope this helps,
>> Ed
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>> Mono-osx at lists.ximian.com
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>
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