MonoMac links .NET to Apple's GUI

With MonoMac and MonoDevelop, .Net applications can be created in the look and feel of Mac. Now published as version 1.0, the free MonoMac contains .NET bindings for a number of Mac OS X APIs. At the same time, the .NET libraries provided by Mono can be used so that applications written in C# or another .NET language look and feel like native Mac programs.

MonoMac includes experience from the development of MonoTouch, which combines .NET with Apple's mobile iOS operating system. In addition, the Mono team automatically evaluated Apple's header files for Objective C with a parser to create the basic structure for bindings. They then manually improved that structure.

MonoMac is a plug-in for the MonoDevelop development environment and can be installed from it. It integrates the MonoDoc documentation system in the IDE so that developers constantly have access to it when working. It also includes a packager that puts .NET programs into packages for Mac OS X. They can reportedly then be made available at Apple's iTunes App Store as well. The linker provided allows functions not used to be removed from the application in order to make it smaller. Online, a number of sample projects for MonoDevelop that illustrate the use of MacMono are available.

MonoMac is available to download from GitHub, and the source code is available under the terms of the MIT/X11 licence.

(crve)