Bringing Smiles to the Faces of MacOS developers

As part of our efforts to bring a superb developer experience to every platform in the world, we have made a new release of our bindings to the MacOS X APIs: MonoMac.

We know that Mac users like to have a smooth installation experience, and we have worked hard to make this as simple as possible. Currently MonoMac is still not a 1.0 product, this is what developers need to do:

• Install Mono for OSX.
• Install MonoDevelop.
• Add the MonoMac repository to MonoDevelop.
• Create a MonoMac project.

The result is a .app that you can distribute to your users.

The MonoMac API design is inspired by work that we did for MonoTouch.

We have achieved a beautiful blend between C# and MacOS that will turn Mac developer's tears of pain into tears of joy.

Community

Update: to get started with MonoMac, you can join other MonoMac-ers on the IRC channel #monomac on server irc.gnome.org.

We use the mono-osx mailing list to discuss the binding.

Hackers

If you want to get your hands on the source code for MonoMac, head over to GitHub and download both monomac and maccore. The former contains the MacOS-specific bindings, while the latter contains the shared code between MonoMac and MonoTouch.

The introductory post to MonoMac still contains many useful links and design details, you might want to read that if you want to hack on MonoMac.

Contributors

Our API coverage right now is very complete. We will certainly add more C# features to the binding as we learn how developers are using the API, but that is a bit of an organic process.

One area that we need help to improve the developer experience is to fill-in all the "summary" sections in our documentation. This information is shown during auto-complete/intellisense for the developer for classes, methods, enumeration values and properties.

Details on how you can contribute to this are on this post of mine.