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

Tue Nov 13 11:37:30 EST 2007

I think this thread as lost its value to the list.  Its become an  
opinion session - and I am as guilty as all. This will be my last spam  
out.

The last thing I will say is that when I was younger, I would have  
echo'd many of these sentiments.  I have been developing with Visual  
Studio since version 1.0.  I worked at MS for several years - before  
the smart guys retired and the influx of kids who thought it a badge  
of honor to be hired at MS (of which I am also guilty of being a  
member).  Many of the smartest devs at MS didn't even use VS.NET, some  
did, but a surprising number favored lighter weight tools - even  
emacs.  That was in the pre-Vista era, so I expect those folks are  
gone - and from the look of Vista, VS.NET was used a lot.

VS.NET has a rich tool set - but it has become a bit bloated these  
days as they try to find new things to stuff in - and for all of its  
features, it isn't very flexible - you do things the VS.NET way... it  
has become the IDE for kids who don't know what a command line is.   
The point-and-click MCSD generation.

I used to laugh at the devs at MS that used emacs.  Now I am one of  
them (sort of), because I too dumped VS.NET for a more lightweight,  
cross-platform IDE.  I doubt many of the Mono devs use VS.NET or  
Monodevelop... my guess is the hardcore ones use emacs or some variant.

Most of the experienced devs I know (and I mean years of experience  
delivering non-trivial software (one friend used to write brain scan  
imaging routines for german MRI company)), don't consider debugging as  
important as tracing.  For all the problems people have cited in this  
thread, their problem was more to do with incomplete tracing code then  
with the abscence of a debugger.  Good trace code will show most of  
what is required, and it can be used in production, where you really  
need it.  Step through debugging is a novice approach - most folks  
with time in the trenches use debuggers for a sort of profiling -  
seeing running threads, stack depth, etc.  The sort of stuff tracing  
doesn't reflect well.  But they rarely step through code.

It will be nice when mono-debugger is ported to OSX, but it isn't the  
end of the world not to have it.  I'd personally rather have JetBrains  
team up with Mono and give us a nice x-plat profiler :)

Cheers,
Sean

On 13-Nov-07, at 9:08 AM, Brock Reeve wrote:

>
> .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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> >
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