Written in C# Available in Multilingual | Operating system | |
 | ||
Developer(s) Xamarin (a Microsoft subsidiary) and the Mono community Stable release 6.1.2.44 / November 11, 2016; 4 months ago (2016-11-11) Repository github.com/mono/monodevelop | ||
MonoDevelop (also known as Xamarin Studio) is an open source integrated development environment for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its primary focus is development of projects that use Mono and .NET frameworks. MonoDevelop integrates features similar to those of NetBeans and Microsoft Visual Studio, such as automatic code completion, source control, a graphical user interface (GUI) and Web designer. MonoDevelop integrates a Gtk# GUI designer called Stetic. It supports Boo, C, C++, C#, CIL, D, F#, Java, Oxygene, Vala, and Visual Basic.NET.
Contents
MonoDevelop can be used on Windows, macOS and Linux. Officially supported Linux distributions include CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu, with many other distributions providing their own unofficial builds of MonoDevelop in their repositories. macOS and Windows have been officially supported since version 2.2.
MonoDevelop has included a C# compiler (an alternative to MSBuild and CSC) since its earliest versions. It currently includes a compiler that supports C# 1.0, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0 and C# 6.0.
A customized version of MonoDevelop ships with Unity, the game engine by Unity Technologies. It enables advanced C# scripting, which is used to compile cross-platform video games by the Unity compiler.
History
In late 2003, a group of developers from the Mono community began migrating SharpDevelop, a successful .NET open source IDE from Windows Forms on Windows to the GNOME toolkit (Gtk#) on Linux. The fork was also to target the Mono framework instead of the Microsoft .NET Framework implementation. Being an early fork of SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop architecturally differs from recent SharpDevelop releases.
Over time, the MonoDevelop project was absorbed into the rest of the Mono project and as of 2016, is actively maintained by Xamarin and the Mono community. Since Mono 1.0 Beta 2, MonoDevelop is bundled with Mono releases.
Starting with version 4.x, Xamarin rebranded MonoDevelop as Xamarin Studio, but only for the Windows version of the IDE. As of 2016, Xamarin Studio also runs on macOS.
Features
MonoDevelop is an IDE for the .NET platform with features comparable to Microsoft Visual Studio. Highlights include:
UI Builder
MonoDevelop has included a GTK# GUI designer called Stetic since version 0.1. to develop GTK+ user interfaces in C#. Stetic is very similar to Glade Interface Designer but is integrated into MonoDevelop with features such as drag and drop. It has been criticized for being more difficult to work with than the likes of Qt Designer and the Microsoft Visual Studio Windows Forms Editor when the programmer does not yet have a concrete layout in mind.
Xamarin Studio
Xamarin offers a rebranded version of MonoDevelop 4.0 as Xamarin Studio which now uses platform-specific code in various places to enhance the look and feel. While Mono provides a package for Solaris 10 running on SPARC, MonoDevelop packages for OpenSolaris are only provided by groups from the OpenSolaris community. MonoDevelop on FreeBSD is likewise supported only by the FreeBSD community.