[MonoDevelop] Re: Monodevelop on windows

Zac Bowling zac@zacbowling.com
Wed, 22 Dec 2004 17:02:57 -0600


I've wrote to this list for a few days ago but I subscripbed under a 
different name on accendent.

I've been porting MD to Win32 for about a week now and I'm almost ready 
for an "unoffical" beta version. You may have seen the screenshot on 
Monologue (http://www.go-mono.com/monologue/ - Thanks Todd). You can 
some other screenshots here on my site 
http://zacbowling.com/monodevelop. This is far from the way I have it 
working now but it shows and example of what it looks like.

People have been asking why would you port MonoDevelop when you have 
#Develop on Win32? Well #Develop is wonderful, but its extremmely slow 
on my laptop and so far all my Windows versions MD seem to respond very 
quickly (although very unstable right now). Also #Develop was never 
designed as well as MD in respect to Mono. As someone who exslusively 
develops apps to work on both Win32 and Linux, I feel better about using 
someone focused on a product that does both almost instinctively.

Its not that big of deal since GTK works on Win32 very nicely however 
there are some issues:
    * I've already ported gtksourceview to Windows, but it still needs 
some patches for little annoyances (but its still very functional).
    * Write patches for codehints (which currently still focus)
    * Patch MD to use Windows native fonts and Windows native open/save 
dialogs.
    * Recompile GTK# to include the gnome-vfs, gconf, and few other 
packages that don't come by default. I use a windows native ported 
versions where possible but this may make rely on the cygwin library 
which sucks.

I also have to choose if I want to include ports (or make people use 
cygwin) for autoconf, automake, pkg-config (which has port in Mono), 
etc. or make custom make files do it and then I have to choose if want 
to use a gnu make port (like cygwin or MinGW) or use nmake files. I 
could even go for Nant make system but lets not push it. The current 
make files may need some heavy modifications, or all the static parts 
will have to seperated out so I can make the windows make file seperate 
out the needed files. Also it needs to be changed so you can compile 
monodevelop with csc or mcs.

The toughest part is documenting how to port it yourself. You need a 
bunch of packages (which I'm going to package together for people into a 
single download).

I'm hopping to make a binary installer with NSIS that includes 
everything you need to get started including Mono, GTK#, documentaion, 
and samples as well as associating file extentions, installing 
shortcuts, and maybe an auto-packaging system.

Project page: http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?monodevelop
Screenshots: http://www.zacbowling.com/

Hope that helps! Happy coding.

Zac Bowling
http://zacbowling.com


Matt Philmon wrote:

>Monodevelop began as a port of #Develop. If you want to work on Windows just
>use #Develop for now. I guess I just don't understand the need for
>Monodevelop on Windows. Is it because you want to use GTK+ for writing your
>GUI instead of Winforms? I guess I just don't get it. Personally I use
>Visual Studio.NET 2003 on Windows and MonoDevelop on Linux. On Windows you
>will have the Microsoft .NET framework installed anyway. This is basically
>guaranteed these days since Microsoft bundles it with so many applications
>and updates these days. Since code with .NET your code is interpreted the
>first time it's run you can even do all your development in Windows (if you
>want). Once Mono is fully implemented you don't even have to recompile the
>code to make it run under Linux as long as it's completely managed code.
>
>That said, I LOVE Monodevelop and what it brings to Linux... I just don't
>get the need for Windows support with so many options already there.
>
>Matt
>
>
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