Building Mono Applications using X-Develop
The final IDE I'll discuss is X-Develop. While this IDE is not free, you can download a 20-day evaluation copy from the
Omnicore software Web site. If you decide to purchase a full copy of this IDE, the going price is currently $149 USD for a single-user license.
| Author's Note: It is my experience that X-Develop is currently the best approach for building Mono applications on Mac OS X, and well worth the asking price. |
Perhaps the major advantage of this particular product is that you can install it on both Windows and Mac OS X as well as on numerous Linux distributions. Beyond this key benefit, X-Develop supports a number of bells and whistles not supported by SharpDevelop or MonoDevelop, for example:
- Support for Microsoft .NET, Mono and Java development
- Numerous Windows Forms and Gtk# visual designer tools
- Integrated support for code refactoring and code metrics
I won't walk through the process of building a complete application using this tool, but for comparison purposes, the process begins similarly to others by creating a new solution using the Solution | New Solution dialog (see
Figure 14).
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| Figure 14. The X-Develop New Solution Dialog: When developing a new solution, you choose your language and the project type from the Create New Project dialog. |
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| Figure 15. The X-Develop IDE: This figure should give you an overall feel for X-Develop as opposed to other IDEs with which you may be familiar. |
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After creating the project, you may then select the Mono runtime version you wish to compile against using the Solution | .NET Framework menu option. You can add assembly references using the Solution Project Properties menu option.
Figure 15 showcases the overall look and feel of X-Develop.
That wraps up this examination of three Mono-aware IDEs. Hopefully you are now convinced that you can happily build Mono-base software decoupled from the command shell. While it is true that a solid knowledge of the command line development tools is a very important aspect of working with the Mono platform, nothing beats the rapid application development provided by a full featured GUI programming environment.
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