Using Visual Studio to develop with Mono

If you are interested in developing with Mono using Visual Studio, there are a number of tools that Francisco Martinez has developed to make your experience smoother.

He created a few screencasts and a general introduction on his blog:

• The Installing VSPrjMake screencast shows how you install the Visual Studio add-in.
• In this screencast he shows how to test your Windows.Forms application with the Mono runtime using Visual Studio.
• In this one he shows how to test an ASP.NET application with Mono from Visual Studio.

Today for the first time I had the chance to play with these on Paco's laptop (he is visiting the Cambridge office this week). He also has developed a tool to choose which Mono runtime to use. The tool is useful for Mono power-users on Windows (you can watch your app work better with new versions of Mono as you go; Or you can track regressions in Mono).

In his blog entry, he has other screencasts showing how to run the same application with different runtimes (.NET CLR and Mono). Check it out.

Pretty much these tools do most of what we had discussed in the past in terms of Visual Studio and Mono integration.

The next step would be to integrate this with a VMWare player with a OpenSUSE OS image to have all the Mono development tools and test applications directly from Visual Studio into the VMware image.