Having just downloaded and installed MonoDevelop for OS X I can say that the process of getting up and running is an absolute breeze – only involving the normal mac ‘download, unpack and drop into Applications’ routine.

MonoDevelop (and indeed Mono itself) allows you to build several types of application – C++, C#, ASP.Net and the like. You can build cross-platform executables – either console-based or with a GUI (the application comes with quick-start project templates for the Gnome# and GTK# tookits) – and also web-based projects. MonoDevelop comes with the xsp server built-in so the code-compile-debug cycle is only a single click away (as a bonus it even opens your browser for you).

MonoDevelop is a Gnome application, so a minor annoyance when using it with OS X is the key-binding setup which requires you to use Ctrl over the Apple key for things like copy, paste and save.

I’m hoping to do some work on a mono-driven ASP.Net application, so I may be posting more on that in the future. For now though – I’d like to give a big thanks (and say congratulations) to the MonoDevelop team.