Feedback/Experiences with Monodevelop on the Mac?

Question

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

Answer 1

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