Last week, Xamarin released version 2.8 of the MonoDevelop development environment.
Biggest feature is xCode 4 support (which integrated the Interface Builder therefore broke MonoDevelop 2.6).
Since it is hard to run xCode 3 on Mac OS X Lion (Mac OS X Lion more than prefers xCode 4), and you need at least xCode 4.2 beta to develop for iOS 5, this welcome upgrade when you are staying current on Mac OS X.
You can use MonoDevelop to create .NET applications for:
- iOS (iPhone/iPad/iPod-touch)
- Mac OS X
- Android
- Windows
- ASP.NET
Be sure to read the MonoDevelop 2.8 release notes, as even the list of Major Highlights is long:
- C# 4.0
- Defaults to the 4.0 profile.
- New Garbage Collection engine
- New Frameworks:
- Parallel Framework
- System.XAML
- Threadpool exception behavior has changed to match .NET 2.0
- potentially a breaking change for a lot of Mono-only software
- See information below in the “Runtime” section.
- New Microsoft open sourced frameworks bundled:
- System.Dynamic
- Managed Extensibility Framework
- ASP.NET MVC 2
- System.Data.Services.Client (OData client framework)
- Performance
- Large performance improvements
- LLVM support has graduated to stable
- Use mono-llvm command to run your server loads with the LLVM backend
- Preview of the Generational Garbage Collector
- Version 2.0 of the embedding API
- WCF Routing
- .NET 4.0’s CodeContracts
- Removed the 1.1 profile and various deprecated libraries.
- OpenBSD support integrated
- ASP.NET 4.0
- Mono no longer depends on GLIB
–jeroen