Good IDE for Mono on Windows

Question

I would like to develop Mono application for Win/Linux/Mac in C# on Windows. Is there any really good (Visual Studio comparable) IDE for that? The best would be if I could manage Visual C# Express to compile solutions using the Mono compiler.

I've found a #develop IDE, which looks very cool and has many features that Express edition of the Visual Studio hasn't (like plugins for TortoiseSVN, NUnit, etc). Hovewer the 3.* versions dropped support for Mono, so you are no longer able to compile solutions using the Mono compiler.

There is also a MonoDevelop . I've tried it and it sucks. Not comparable to Visual Studio at all. No WinForms designer, + tons of other missing features. I would just like if they would drop the development of MonoDevelop and build a plugin for #develop instead.

Is there any other good enough IDE, or is it possible to make the Visual C# Express or #develop compile the solutions with Mono compiler?

EDIT: Delphi Prism looks cool, but it isn't C#.

Answer 1

You can always develop your applications using Visual Studio Express Edition (since you don't want to pay for the Mono Tools). Monodevelop will support compilation of Visual Studio solutions now, so just develop in VS, and recompile occasionally in Monodevelop to guarantee support.

Since Mono now supports Windows Forms, you can develop a Windows Forms application entirely in Visual Studio, and just deploy it using Mono. Since C# compiles to IL, it doesn't matter which IDE you use to develop - you can still run it on Mono.

Answer 2

How about Mono Tools for Visual Studio ?

Note that it's a commercial plugin.

Answer 3

Whilst SharpDevelop 3.2 does not support mono out of the box but if you download the source code for SharpDevelop you can find a code sample that contained the original code for mono support. If you build that sample then mono support will be re-enabled in SharpDevelop.

A decision was made to remove mono support from the main SharpDevelop application since only support for compiling with mono was provided and MonoDevelop can now run on Windows. Note that mono support in SharpDevelop does not provide any integrated debugging with mono's debugger and there is no GTK# designer compared with MonoDevelop.

Answer 4

You can use Mono Tools for Visual Studio . However, it's a paid product.

Answer 5

I think your best bet will be to do development with VS C# Express, and then use a virtual machine--such as VMWare, Virtual PC, VirtualBox, etc.--to access Linux (which is the primary platform for MonoDevelop, and on which it works really well, comparably to VS.)

There are even a number of downloads available that are primed for doing exactly this. You could even use a Live CD, and just reboot your machine to get into Linux (which can usually access Windows partitions with no problems.)