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110

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I use a Mac at home and love it, but in my work environment/career path I work with C# mostly. I've tried using Monodevelop a few times but in my experience I've found it to be very buggy and just not a pleasant experience. So I'm using Windows in Boot Camp so I can use the Visual Studio environment. Has anyone else had bad experiences with Mono or better yet - does anyone have suggestions on how I might make better use of it on my Mac in regard to setup/configuration? I know it's a bit broad, but I prefer my Mac environment and would love to make coding in C# as easy as possible and avoid constantly switching between OS's or running in VMWare. Thanks in advance!

/matt

+2  A: 

I have had similar experiences (buginess/instability in MD on Mac OS X). About a month ago on Twitter I connected with some of the folks who maintain it (specifically Michael Hutchinson and Miguel de Icaza). I found them to be very willing to address concerns. Apparently there are a number of severe issues with the GUI toolkit that the Mac version uses (GTK#). I found that there are other bugs too, which need to be dealt with.

You can click back up through one of my conversations to see how that went: http://twitter.com/mjhutchinson/statuses/2506771429

He recommended filing bugs for a couple of the issues that I brought up. He fixed one issue within minutes. AFAIK, the other bug hasn't been touched since then. As I see it that is the only way it is going to get better: continue to bug issues and continue to express interest in the product. I personally would love a stable native Mac OS X dev environment. Until that happens the Mac isn't a viable platform for .NET development for me.

Bug filing is done through Novel: http://monodevelop.com/Developers#Reporting_Bugs

McKAMEY
Sorry, I've been really tied up working on the MonoTouch addin. I'll certainly make sure the bug's fixed for the 2.2 release! We definitely appreciate good bug reports. Although we do dogfood MonoDevelop by using it to work on itself, this obviously doesn't stress areas such as ASP.NET. Also, many bugs are specific to certain system configurations or runtime versions, so user feedback is essential.
mhutch
Thank you both for your input on this, I really want to like/use Monodevelop, I'd much rather stay on my MacBook for work than have to jump back and forth! /matt
Matt Dewey
I'd just like to put a thanks in here to the whole Mono team. The project is a huge undertaking and they are doing a great job. I've especially appreciated how responsive they have been to feedback.
McKAMEY