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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

I've been playing with it on my own, and I tend to agree. MonoDevelop is still pretty rough--I'm doing game stuff, so I'm kicking any actual OS X development down the road as far as humanly possible--but once you get your code deploying, it's a very nice setup.

I'd really like a way to build in VS (maybe against dummy assemblies or something) and kick it over to my MBP for real compilation and deployment, though. I respect their desire to funnel users through MonoDevelop, but it doesn't step to VS+R#.

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I'd personally love for JetBrains to do a C# variant of IDEA (+ R#) for us OSX/*nix folk. I have serious doubts such a beast would be commercially viable, though.

(Maybe R# for MonoDevelop? One can dream...)

Why not? Visual Studio costs thousands of dollars a license. They could even compete on price, not only features. Windows is a market for such a product just as much as *X is.

VS Professional is only $500, not "thousands of dollars". It used to be $300 for 2008 Pro, but even now it is still OK for an indie at $500.

MSDN is supposedly $100 for 3 years through BizSpark.

MSVS is free-$500; and has the significant advantage of both a direct connection to the .NET team and not being that bad of an IDE on it's own merits (not to mention being bundled in a MSDN subscription, which a MS-heavy shop is going to have anyway). It's far more viable on Windows for JetBrains to augment MSVS via R# rather than attempt to compete head-on when the deck is so stacked against them.

I don't think they're trying to funnel users to MonoDevelop, I think they're using it because the iOS SDK is for Mac.

Take a look at Mono for Android, for example. It uses a VS plugin instead of MonoDevelop.

I might be in the minority here, but I use MonoDevelop in preference to visual studio.

It's got a couple of irritating issues (the plugin support is rubbish even now, and it's ridiculously complicated to roll your own), but its just so fast.

My morning at work is: git pull, go get coffee while VS spazzes out for 5 minutes and resharper reindexes everything.

Nothing a bit of RAM and a fast CPU can't fix... Alt if you have a very large solution with multiple projects you could split it up...

IMO, that sounds like an issue with your hardware. I use a three-year-old desktop with a Nehalem i7 and 16GB of RAM (or my rMBP with Parallels, which may be faster) and VS/R# is pretty happen even with 50+ projects and about 1600 source files.

Older machine? Overactive anti-virus or something causing file I/O pain?

What version of VS are you using? I found 2010 to be painful when opening large solutions (and Resharper does not help I agree). But if you can get past the new UI changes, 2012 overall seems a lot quicker to load up and (for me at least) provides a much smoother experience. My favorite thing: the "Reload All Projects" option, for times when you do a Get Latest on your root folder outside of VS and now 35 projects need to reload at once. This was just brutal in 2010 and older versions.

I built a remote deployment/testing gizmo for Mono in college (admittedly crap, but I was a Summer of Code student, I was as terrible as advertised!). While not nearly as complex as remote building, I'm pretty sure it can be done.

I'd pay for MonoTouch like-right-now, even though the project I really want it for isn't near ready for it, if I could write in VS, press a button, and have it build and deploy on my Mac.

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