Now that I’m working through my Mono Developer’s Notebook, I thought it’s time for some first impressions on C# and Mono. Ok, they are not really first impressions, as I’ve played with the framework before. But not until now have I done so methodically, with the aim of really learning C# and the class libraries.Firsts impressions:
First off, C# is a pretty modern language which features stuff like automatic garbage collection, support for interfaces, versioning, delegates and much more. I really like the StringBuilder, and think that regular expressions are handled in a nice way. Collections and Indexers are pretty neat too, and I yet have to look into Attributes and Reflection a little more. I also like the great documentation that can either be found on the MSDN library or the Mono website.

What I don’t like is that like Java C# is a pretty verbose language, which means you have to write lots of code for simple tasks. I guess that’s the problem that comes with such a comprehensive class library: easy programs get more complicated than necessary, but the advantages of the framework really pay off when you start writing larger applications. It feels kinda strange to work with a strongly typed language again, but I’m getting used to it faster than you can say “type cast”. ;) I’m missing quite a lot of the nice iterators Ruby has to offer, but at least C# has a decent foreach loop. Still it’s strange to have to write all this for loops again, when a simple 10.downto(1) or 5.times could have achieved the same…

IDEs:
When it comes to editing C# files, I naturally thought about using Vim, which of course offers syntax highlighting for the language. However, it is not an IDE, and for a language with such an excessive class library, I really prefer to have all this nifty things like auto-completion (if only someone would port Intellisense to Linux), integrated documentation etc.

Enter MonoDevelop, a GTK port of the famous SharpDevelop. It’s a nice IDE that caters exclusively to the Mono programmer, e.g. I really ike how they seamlessly integrated MonoDoc. The problem is that MD is still very much a work in progress and is missing some features like starting a program from the IDE with specified parameters and also sometimes crashes on me. Still I think that over time MD may well become the #1 Mono IDE for Linux. I surely will use it again when I start playing around with Boo.

For the time being though I will continue to use Anjuta 1.2.4 as my IDE of choice. It offers good syntax highlighting and auto-completion, and unlike MD it also does code folding. If I want to test a program from the IDE I can start it with “Build” – “Set program params …” without the need for a seperate terminal window (Note: for this to work I had to add change the line mono “$(current.full.filename).exe” to “mono $(current.full.filename).exe $(anjuta.program.arguments)” under “Settings” – “Commands” – “Execute”). Anjuta is a pretty mature development environment, so it offers all the goodies you might expect from such a tool (like CVS integration), without having an overly cluttered interface. Also version 2 is coming along nicely (Screenshot) and has cool features like Glad integration.

That’s it for today, but I think I’ll continue to post about my adventures in Mono land…