After my jump from Windows to Mac OSX, the worst thing for me as a developer was the lack of developement solutions for my favourite programming language C#.

On Windows and Linux we got great tools like Visual Studio, Sharp Develop and MonoDevelop, which are great to implement applications for both platforms. But, because of major differences between OSX and Windows/Linux, it is no real solution to use these tools to create an application for OSX.

After some heavy research, I managed to get a build-process working to create real integrated Cocoa-OSX-Applications. My first real-life app was SimpleTODO. (Which is now OpenSource.)

During this time I tried out many Editors and found Eclipse, with Improve-Plugin, fitting best my needs (basic syntax highlighting, build-script-execution, integrated console). Still it was absolutely impossible to do rapid developement.

Learn more about MonoMate after the jump…

For the last weeks I have been working hard on MonoMate. It has a much better working syntax highlighting than Improve, executes my buildscripts with more features, has a big integrated console and reads any compilation problems to present it for you in a table, text-indentation works like it should, and most important: it has templates. It creates your project as well as any type of class you will need for your application. The projects theirself are including all the building tools, so they can be compiled even on non-MonoMate-machines.

It has the version 0.1, sometimes crashes or needs to get restarted. With the version growing, I want to build in features like context menues (you know these nice little menues popping up while you are typing the code) and generally many features which are based on the ability of MonoMate to gain deeper knowledge on the classes you are writing.

To make MonoMate really big, I have definately not enough time, so any help is appreciated. If their is enough interest I will make MonoMate OpenSource.

The technologies behind MonoMate are: Mono and Monobjc.