MonoDevelop 2.2 Beta supports Mac OS X and Windows

MonoDevelop 2.2 Beta 1 on Windows MonoDevelop, the IDE for Mono and .NET, has officially gone cross platform with support for Windows and Mac OS X in the new beta of version 2.2. In his blog, Miguel De Icaza says that this is more than just a "plain GUI port" as it also provides "installers, deep operating system integration and support for native debugging on each platform."

The What's New page for MonoDevelop 2.2 goes into more detail. On Windows, the new Windows installer only requires gtk# to work. The Mac OS X port works as a Mac application, that is – using the Mac's single global menu bar, rather than a menu bar in each window.

Beyond the porting, the IDE has acquired a number of useful new features. Multiple different Mono or .NET runtimes can be targeted by a single project making it simple to cross platform or runtime develop. Formatting settings for text files can now be set per mime type, and are saved within a project. There's also housekeeping improvements; when a project is deleted, MonoDevelop now asks if the user wants to delete just the project or some or all of the project files.

Other improvements include better performance in the editor and autosave support, a new C# code formatter with on-the-fly formatting, a better vi mode and a code generator for common tasks. Re-factoring has also been enhanced with the addition of method extraction, type extraction and in-line renaming. There are also new add-ins for supporting ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight/Moonlight and iPhone.

MonoDevelop 2.2 beta 1 on Mac OS X De Icaza closes the announcement by saying the plan for MonoDevelop is to support many other languages. "We want to embrace not only .NET-based projects like Gtk#, Silverlight, ASP.NET, Boo, C#, F#, Visual Basic and Windows.Forms. We are also embracing other developer platforms like Python, C/C++, Vala, and we want to expand our presence to work with the Flash, PHP, Ruby, Rails, Flex and any other communities that need a cross platform IDE."

MonoDevelop 2.2 beta 1 is available now to download and detailed release notes are available. MonoDevelop is licensed under the GPLv2.

(djwm)