MonoDevelop beta 3 on Mac OS X

I’ve had Mono installed since I bought my Mac, but the lack of a good IDE made me frustrated enough to install a Windows XP virtual machine and use Visual Studio instead. Until now that is, because I listened to the .NET Rocks! show #313 yesterday where Miguel de Icaza and Geoff Norton talk about the upcoming Mono 2.0 and how the IDE MonoDevelop is included in the OS X installer for Mono. I’ve tried installing MonoDevelop before, but it was such a hassle on OS X that I just gave up. I need stuff to be easy, or I move on to something else.

After I installed the new Mono (1.2.6) package this morning and then dragged the MonoDevelop beta 3 to Applications, it was a great relief to see the IDE pop up. I created an ASP.NET site in a few seconds and fired it up using the built-in server. Then I added some code-behind and everything worked great. I haven’t tried anything more advanced, but I felt I was so excited about this product that I just had to blog about it instantly. If you’re a Mac & .NET freak (I’m looking in your direction Joakim), try this out poste haste!

Edit: The MonoDevelop installer I found was in the mono 1.2.6 dmg that I downloaded from www.mono-project.com. For some reason I can’t find a similar installer at the MonoDevelop site.