Running is therapy

Most of my friends know that lately I have become pretty interested in C# and .Net for Linux. I have booted windows to try the System.Windows.Forms stuff just to see what the hubub was about, and yeah, it makes GUI dev for windows easy…but that is not something I am all that interested in…well I am not all that interested in GUI development period.

This brings me to my first point which is that I have been finding things are pretty easy to get up and running so far. I have used a few of the libraries at this point and found them to work well. The documentation for the .Net libs that are part of the monoproject are lacking, but the mailing list seems to get a fair amount of traffic and there have been regular updates to C#, the libs and the main IDE (monodevelop). I take that to mean that the whole thing is under a good bit of development and as things get more robust, perhaps we’ll see better documentation.

I have been trying to use monodevelop, mostly because IDE’s for languages that have a lot of libraries can be handy, and for the most part it works. However, it still needs work. There is no ASP.NET syntax highlighting (at least none that I could find, and a post to the list turned up nothing). Also, I find the vernacular used to be a little confusing. I suppose it’s an effort to make Visual Studio users comfortable, but having never used that I feel like I should be reading documentation on the IDE instead of fumbling around in the interface willy nilly…but of course I don’t.

I mostly have been using eclipse. It’s ok. It excels for Java development, but the C# plugin is no where near as robust. Not that I am complaining, I certainly didn’t lift a finger to help with the plugin, so what can I really say.

I have been threatening to gather a bunch of vim macros and write some of my own to make it’s C# experience shit simple…but I of course never do :)

I picked up Mono, A Developers Notebook. It’s pretty good. Real light on theroy, so unless you are motivated to learn the theroy behind some of the practice in there, you may want to wait a bit before buying. It’s a great way to write a book though in my opinion. I like that for 90% of the things you want to do with a new language there are examples and hints in there. It makes the pain of transition really bearable.

That’s it for now