The official 1.0 release of MonoDevelop was announced late last week. The open source development environment includes a number of advanced features such as project management tools, a graphical user interface designer, a unit testing system, version control integration, and an add-in system that facilitates extensibility. MonoDevelop provides code completion, passive error notification, code navigation, and autoindent functionality for several programming languages, including C#, VB.NET, and C/C++.
I tested several builds of MonoDevelop prior to this release and found that it offers good support for rapid development of Mono-based applications. The built-in user interface designer—which is called Stetic—is integrated very well and has a few nice features that aren't found in Glade, like support for in-place menu editing. The whole environment feels very polished, but there are still a few holes in the feature set. Lack of support for graphical debugging is the most noticeable weakness in MonoDevelop 1.0, but the feature is already partially implemented in trunk and will likely appear in the 1.1 release.
The developers plan to issue new releases every six months and will be adding a few other exciting things in the future as well. The developers eventually hope to include design tools for WinForms and Silverlight. For more details, check out the release notes, and a blog entry written by lead Mono developer Miguel de Icaza about the history of MonoDevelop and some of the features that are under active development for future versions.
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