I’m toying around with Spring.NET, and since I’m using MonoDevelop on my Mac I don’t have ReSharper to automatically set my using directives. That means I have to consult some documentation to find out what namespace a certain class belongs to in the Spring.NET framework before I can use it. I don’t remember life before ReSharper being this hard.

So I decided to open up the SDK documentation, which is conveniently placed in a .chm file. Conveniently if you’re running on Windows that is. I needed some application to view the .chm file on OS X and I found two open source alternatives:

1. Chmox (version 0.3). It displayed the contents annoyingly close to the window borders, and more importantly had no search function. Since I don’t want to scroll through half of the documentation to find where a certain class belongs, I had to go the next option:
2. xCHM (version 1.13). It has some GUI issues that aren’t too bad, and it has a search feature. Winner by no contest, and Bob’s your uncle. Too bad Mac builds are discontinued, that’s the reason I chose another version than the latest.

Problem solved, I’m back to exploring Aspect Oriented Programming in Spring.NET again.

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.