A Ninja Kit

This week was Hack Week at Novell. My idea for the hack week was to Integrate Vim with MonoDevelop. Not just as an external editor used by MD to open files, but integration, so MD should be aware of changes being done via vim and vim should respond to various commands from MD.

Current implementation status is that you can see gvim in monodevelop, i have two way communication mostly setup. The class and method combos above the editor respond to cursor changes in vim, and selecting a class/method from the combos makes vim jump to the correct position. It supports code completion (yay!). Vim gets the code completion info from monodevelop.

But there are problems. Vim has some bugs which hinder some stuff, so next I’ll try to fix those bugs in vim. Its not really distributable right now, but it should be soon. I’m not sure whether a lot of people would be interested in this or what all features would be desirable, so feel free to give feedback. Here is a small demo of what is available right now:

This is just a quick post, I’ll post one with more details soon. If you like the project then please vote here.

WordPress 2.1 was truncating the <description> element of the RSS feed for my blog, so some readers would show truncated  posts! Setting feed options to “Full Text” didn’t help.  The solution i found : CompleteRSS plugin. Works perfectly fine now

I’ve been hacking on MonoDevelop for some time now. Next release would be the first one for me Thanks to all the people who’ve been helping me out!

I mainly contributed (with lots of help from lluis) on two features for this release :

Native support for VS2005 Projects

MonoDevelop now has native support for Visual Studio 2005 solutions/projects in the prj2make addin. You can directly load VS2005 solutions/projects and work with them. Any changes made are written back to the project files. So you can effectively share the same project files between VS2005 and MonoDevelop. This has been in svn for a while now.

Thanks to all the people helping out with the testing Its not complete yet, needs more testing. Am eager to get feedback and bug reports on this

Currently it supports loading C# (.csproj) and VB.NET (.vbproj) projects. The support is not msbuild based, so things like custom msbuild tasks won’t work. But Marek Sieradzki already has a draft patch to add support for using msbuild!

Integration with Makefiles

MonoDevelop now supports integration with Makefiles for projects. This integration covers the following features:

• Delegating build, clean and/or execute operations to Makefiles
• Keeping the monodevelop project in sync with the Makefile wrt:
  • List of files (code, resources, deployable files and others).
  • List of references (only for .NET projects).

MonoDevelop itself uses this for keeping its project files and Makefiles in sync.

The release notes for the next release will have more details

New domain! New.. err, yet another attempt at a blog Lets see how this fares..