[MonoDevelop] Migrating from VS and R#

[Mike Krüger]

  Hi
> 1) My top feature of R# is, surprisingly, identifier coloring. Personally
> for me it significantly simplifies mental parsing of the program. Being able
> to easily distinguish fields, methods, locals and arguments is invaluable.
> Any ideas how I can achieve this with MonoDevelop? I tried semantic
> highlighting, but it seems to only highlight class names (e.g. within
> typeofs).
>
Atm no - got really an option doing that with the current parser layer - 
but it's on my todo list.

> 2) Another thingie in R# that I also use frequently is "Ctrl+Alt+Space",
> which displays an intellisense list of applicable methods that gets
> populated from all referenced assemblies and namespace, *regardless* of
> whether there's a corresponding "using" at the top of the file. So, if I
> have lots of utility extension methods (and I do), I don't have to populate
> usings first or enter a name and then wait for the quick-fix popup to
> emerge, I just type several first symbols of the method name and then hit
> Ctrl+Alt+Space - it will automatically search through my references and
> auto-import namespaces if necessary. How does one achieve the same effect in
> MonoDevelop? I tried "Toggle Completion Suggestion Mode", but didn't manage
> to figure out what it does.
>
We have something like that - your hotkey should work.

> 3) If we talk about navigation, I must confess that I'm impressed by the
> speed of various "Go To..." dialogs. However, I wasn't able to find
> analogues of several important features I use every day. Firstly, "Go To
> Definition" doesn't display something like Studio's assembly browser (or w/e
> it is called) when I use it on a library class. Secondly, it appeared that
> I'm quite addicted at Ctrl+clicking method/class usages to go to definition.
> It seems, that both features are missing. Any workarounds?
>
ctrl clicking is missing atm - workaround: Implement it - you've the source.
(or wait for we doing that - we'll do that 100% ... I want a nice 
underlining effect when holding control,
again postponed till the new parser layer is in place).

we've an assembly browser.

> 4) (An offtopic). Expanding the topic of navigation, I'd love to ask your
> opinion on Reflector's replacement. Yeh, of course, one can run Reflector
> under Mono, however, most navigation features in Reflector depend on IE, so
> they become broken in Linux. Any ideas here?
>
We've an assembly browser for that :)
> 5) Finally, is there a possibility to turn off automatic highlighting of
> local/parameter usages within a method. That's a rough analogue of R#'s
> Alt+Shift+F7, however, sometimes it's annoying, so I'd love to disable this
> feature by default and toggle it whenever I need it. How do I do that? Upd.
> Yeh, a small addition. Is there a way to make those symbol highlighting
> persistent as in R#, so that they don't disappear whenever I move the caret
> away from the symbol of interest?
>
No - atm not.
> I'd like to stress it once again - I'm very pleasantly surprised to see that
> overwhelming amount of my favourite VS+R# features have equivalent or better
> analogues in MD. Yeh, there are some bugs (e.g. with extract/inline variable
> refactorings), but they can be tolerated - overall quality is still pretty
> impressive.
.. I hope I can work on the refactoring/language support stuff again 
after the next release.

Regards
Mike