Tips

Tips to use developing with MonoDevelop

Working Space behaviors and futures:

• Maximize your editing space by setting pads to auto-hide.
• Search pads can be pinned so that their results are not lost when further searches are performed.
• Double-click on an editor tab to hide all pads, maximising the editing space. Double-click again to restore the previous state.
• The Properties Pad provides contextual properties for many things. As well as editing widgets in the GUI designer, it can be used to set the deploy/build mode of files in the Solution Pad, the resource ID of resources, and whether a file is to be built or deployed.
• To find files/classes on all the opened projects/solutions press Ctrl+Alt+o or go to ‘Search -> Go to file..’ menu, and you will see all the files.
• The ‘File -> Open file in solution’ command allows you to jump quickly to any file in the solution.

Solutions:

• A solution can be used to group together the library and application projects that make up your application, allowing them to reference each other.
• MonoDevelop can open and save most Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 solution and project files directly, but not all MonoDevelop or Visual Studio features are fully supported.

General Projects:

• If you need to use an external assembly in your project, you can just add a reference to it by right-clicking on the References folder in the Solution Pad and selecting it from the list of assemblies registered in your system, a list of projects in the current Solution, or any assembly that exists on your filesystem
• Add a translation project to your solution to translate it using Gettext.
• You can control how a file is treated in your project, whether it is included in the build, embedded as a resource, included in deployment, or ignored yet still included in the file list. To change these options for each file, open the Properties Pad by going to ‘View -> Properties’, and select the file you want from your project file list. You can then select how the file is treated by changing the ‘Build -> Build Action’ option the the Properties tab.
• You can change the targeted runtime – 1.1, 2.0, Silverlight 1.1 – by right-clicking on the project name in the Solution tab, selecting ‘Project Options’, and going to ‘General -> Runtime Options’.
• You can refresh your project file list by right-clicking on the project name, and selecting ‘Display Options -> Refresh’. This can be particularly useful if you use the Version Control Addin and you update or commit files externally and need to refresh their updated status inside MonoDevelop.
• Add a packaging project to your solution to package the output of other projects for distribution.
• Makefile integration can be used to synchronize file lists and references to variables in Makefiles, and can invoke Makefile targets to perform builds.
• In the C# compiler options, defines should be separated by commas e.g. VERBOSE,MONO,ETC.
• If you get any ‘Type not found’ compilation errors, you may be missing a reference to a common assembly such as System or System.Xml. Edit your project’s referenced assemblies by right-clicking on the ‘References’ folder in the Solution Pad and selecting ‘Edit references’.

ASP.NET Projects:

• When building an ASP.NET project, MonoDevelop can automatically add fields representing the controls in aspx pages to their corresponding CodeBehind classes.
• Editing the references for an ASP.NET project will automatically update the web.config file.

Editor:

• The ‘override’ keyword in C# activates code completion that can stub out overrides for virtual and abstract members from base classes and implementations of members in the interfaces that the class implements.
• The key combination Control+Space can be used to activate the code completion window, if available, anywhere in the code editor.
• Code navigation and refactoring operations can be accessed by right-clicking on the variables, types and members in the code editor.
• Simple code templates can be activated by entering the template’s code, such as ‘scwl’, and pressing the Tab key. Templates may be added and edited in the Editor Preferences.
• Add XML documentation comments, which start with ‘///’, and they will show up in tool tips and code completion.
• In the source editor, right-clicking on a field will allow you to encapsulate it automatically as a property.
• When C# Smart Indentation is enabled, the Tab key re-indents the current line.
• The ‘Rename’ context menu command for code identifiers will automatically find and correct all references.
• If you have ’//TODO:’ and other task comments in your code, they will show up in the task list. You can customize it with your own like ‘//THINK:’ or ‘//RESEARCH:’.

Gtk# Designer:

• Designing a form with Gtk# involves packing widgets into nested containers. Widget sizes and positions are calculated automatically, depending on the size of the form and the widget.
• When you add an event handler in the Gtk# GUI designer using the ‘Signals’ tab in the Properties Pad, MonoDevelop will add a stub for the method.
• In Gtk#, create widgets that inherit Gtk.Bin and they will show up in the designer’s toolbox for easy reuse.

Others:

• The command-line program ‘mdtool’ can be used to build MD solutions and generate Makefiles, among other things.
• If your project is under version control, the Status/Commit view can be used to enter messages for each file. These will be used to create a commit message and a ChangeLog entry that you can editr before committing.
• If you have the sshfs FUSE filesystem installed, the Web Deploy dialog can be used to deploy your ASP.NET project to a remote server over SSH.
• Additional add-ins may be available from MonoDevelop’s online add-in repositories, providing new or updated functionality. To install them, go to ‘Tools -> Add-in Manager’, and click ‘Install Add-ins’.
• The Subversion integration makes source control very easy. If not convinced, investigate the ChangeLog integration.
• When writing applications that may be used on other platforms such as Windows, be aware of differences in the path separators and casing of filenames. Detailed guidelines for cross-platform development are available at Guidelines:Application Portability
• For a faster startup, disable unneeded add-ins using the Addin Manager.