[MonoDevelop] Planning MonoDevelop 1.0

Jacob Ilsø Christensen jacobilsoe at gmail.com
Fri Nov 24 10:10:42 EST 2006


Hi.

On 11/23/06, Lluis Sanchez <lluis at ximian.com> wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> After several years of development MonoDevelop is beginning to be really
> useful to develop real applications, so I think it makes sense to start
> planning a stable 1.0 release. My proposal is the following:
>
>      * MD beta 1 release around mid January (two months from now). In
>        this release we would include most of the missing features for
>        1.0 (see below). We would do code freeze at this point.
>
>      * MD beta 2 (or RC) release around mid February. Mainly bug fixes
>        and memory usage reduction.
>
>      * MD 1.0 release around mid March. It will include the latest bug
>        fixes. I also think we should work on writing documentation for
>        this release, specially tutorials.
>
> So, which features is MD 1.0 going to include?. I'd like to get input
> from contributors and users about that, but I think what we should do is
> to finish and polish what we already have.
>
> I went through all add-ins and I have written down some notes about
> what's missing on each of them (bugs aside):
>
>      * MonoDevelop core: The core can be considered complete now. No
>        major new features are planned. However, we need to make an
>        audit of the API to make sure we don't have public classes or
>        methods which don't really need to be public. I'd like also to
>        find some time to reorganize a bit the extension point tree
>        (which has a mixture of SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop branches),
>        to something like what I described some months ago:
>        http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/monodevelop-list/2006-January/003077.html
>
>      * Debugger: I know a lot of people will ask for this, but I fear
>        the debugger won't be ready by our code freeze date. We can
>        release it later on as a separate add-in.
>
>      * Documentation browser: The Monodoc integration more or less
>        works, but there are some known crashes. However I still believe
>        that showing Monodoc in an external window would be more
>        practical that the current integrated view. The integrated
>        documentation tree is not really useful, we don't have search or
>        an index integrated.
>
>      * Text editor: There are several requests/issues to solve:
>              * Parameter completion: after typing the name of a method,
>                show a popup window with information about the
>                parameters the method takes.
>              * Remove C#-isms. The code completion engine has several
>                C#-isms in the code, which may make it difficult to
>                integrate with other languages.
>              * Configurable key bindings. That's not specific to the
>                editor, but people mostly complain about it. I'm not
>                sure we can implement this for 1.0.
>              * Refactory operations. We have and under-used refactory
>                API. It would be nice to use it to implement some basic
>                refactoring operations.
>
>      * VS importer: Ankit is working on supporting VS2005 files right
>        now. The idea is that you can open VS files directly in MD and
>        work with those projects like if they were native projects. It
>        will support writing changes such as adding files or modifying
>        the project configuration. Ideally, we should do the same for
>        VS2003 (right now it only supports importing for VS2003
>        projects).
>
>      * ASP.NET support: I don't know if this add-in can be mature
>        enough for the 1.0 release. I'll need input on that (which
>        features could we release? would the add-in be really useful for
>        real world web projects?).
>
>      * GTK# designer: There are several features to be implemented in
>        the designer before the release:
>              * Support partial classes when generating code.
>              * Support for Undo/Redo.
>              * Reuse the toolbox implemented for the ASP.NET add-in.
>              * Support for some missing controls, such as Gtk.Fixed and
>                context menus. It would be nice to have a TreeView
>                designer, but it may be too much work for 1.0.
>
>      * MonoQuery database management: I have no idea of what is the
>        status of this add-in. I have never really used it. Can somebody
>        give input about it? Do we want to support it for 1.0?
>
>      * NUnit: It can be considered feature complete for 1.0. The only
>        missing issue to resolve is what to do with the NUnit
>        dependency. Right now the add-in can't be built with recent
>        NUnit versions since they have breaking changes. I talked about
>        this with Charlie Poole in the Mono summit and he suggested to
>        embed the most recent NUnit dlls into the add-in, since even if
>        the API has some breaking changes, new NUnit versions can still
>        run tests written for all the previous versions.
>
>      * Version Control: I recently integrated some of the changes done
>        for the Google SoC project and improved it a lot. Support for
>        SVN is mostly functional. What's missing is support for CVS. It
>        would be nice to have for MD 1.0.
>
>      * Welcome page: It looks ok to me.
>
>      * Web references: I'd like to integrate the web references add-in
>        implemented by Gideon de Swardt. The only problem I see is that
>        it only supports .NET 2.0 projects. It would be nice to make it
>        work for 1.1 as well.
>
>      * Xml editor: It's being maintained outside of MD, so nothing to
>        add. Just to make sure it works when we release 1.0.
>
>      * Boo: I think this add-in is complete, but I'd also like to know
>        the opinion of Peter about this. In any case, there is one issue
>        that should be fixed: right now the Boo add-in always starts an
>        external process which runs the backend for the Boo shell. This
>        process should only be started if the user opens the shell,
>        since it's a waste of memory otherwise.
>
>      * CSharp: It is mostly complete. We may need to add support for
>        partial classes. I'm not sure they are correctly handled by the
>        parser right now.
>
>      * ILAsm: I haven't used it for a long time. I guess it works.
>
>      * Java: It's mostly complete, although there are some IKVM
>        configuration issues that need to be fixed.
>
>      * VB.NET: I don't think there is support for generics. We may want
>        to migrate to the new VB compiler.
>
>      * Nemerle: Don't know much about the status. Any input? The big
>        problem I find is that it depends on a specific version of
>        Nemerle from SVN. If it can't be made to depend on a packaged
>        Nemerle version we won't be able to include it in the MD
>        release.
>
>      * ChangeLog add-in: It's now integrated with the version control
>        add-in. There are ideas for improving it.
>
>      * Autotools: There are several features I'd like to support for MD
>        1.0:
>              * Support integration with existing Makefiles. That is, if
>                somebody has a project with complex build rules which
>                can't be emulated by MD, just make it possible to
>                delegate the entire build process to Make, and still be
>                able to launch the build from inside MD. About modifying
>                the Makefile in MD, I think supporting adding/removing
>                files would be enough for now.
>              * We need to find a solution for file templates (.in
>                files). MD uses some of them. We need to support them in
>                the MD build model if we want to be able to completely
>                build MD using MD.
>              * There may be other missing features needed for
>                self-hosting MD.
>              * It would be nice to support generating a tarball without
>                having to pollute the project directory with autotools
>                files.
>
>      * IDE extensions for Mono: Nothing much to do. Just make sure it
>        works with the most recent Mono makefiles.
>
> As you can see that's a lot of work. I think we should prioritize
> working on features related with development GNOME desktop applications
> (which has been the main goal of MD anyway).
>
> I'd like to get feedback about this plan. I may not have a complete view
> of every add-in, and I'm sure I'm missing things.

>From a UE perspective I would really like to see
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=54686 fixed in version 1.0.
Any chance for that to happen? :-)

/Jacob

>
> Thanks!
> Lluis.
>
>
>
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