The last couple of weeks I’ve spent working with C#. I had already seen and worked with it before, during my study, but this time I worked on a personal project. I’ll make another post about the project itself in the future, but now I’d like to write about C# itself and the platform surrounding it.

I’m normally a bit skeptical of anything Microsoft produces, but I’ll say C# is a rather nice language in itself; a bit more so than Java. There’s nothing spectacular about it, but it does offer some things that would make me prefer it over Java. I’m thinking small things like events, readonly fields, and no silly restriction of one class per unit.

That’s just the language, though. I don’t feel like judging the standard libraries. But I can say that I’ve had no significant dissappointment there either.

What this post is really about, however, and what gets me quite excited, is MonoDevelop. I dare say that this is shaping up to be the integrated Rapid Application Development environment for GNOME. It’s a bit buggy, I still can’t find any debugger integration (but saw screenshots of work in progress months ago, so I guess it’s in the pipeline), but altogether I really wouldn’t be able to point out any other IDE quite like it. And this comes from someone who’s otherwise quite firmly in the Eclipse camp when it comes to Java, Python, C/C++ and D.

The builtin GUI builder Stetic works well, writing signal handling code is a snap, other features I expect from an IDE are there as well: refactoring, class browser, compiler error parsing, code completion, etc. Perhaps the only thing really missing is the debugger integration.

Even tough the project I’m working on has both a Windows Forms and GTK# front-end, development primarily takes place in MonoDevelop. Updating the Windows Forms front-end is often postponed until right before a release.

So that’s it. I just wanted to dedicate a post to this great emerging platform.