How to use Team Foundation Service with MonoDevelop

  As you probably know Team Foundation Service team announced a few days ago full support for Git protocol. This was AWESOME news for our small company that needed a FREE source control solution for our MonoTouch and Mono for Android projects. We were already using visualstudio.com for our Windows Phone and Windows 8 projects and previously to Git support in TFS we had an in-house svn server but I was not really happy with it. The thing it took me most was to understand what is the Git endpoint address than everything is standard.

  Here is a quick guide on how to create and then use a TFS Git repository with MonoDevelop:

1. First you need to create a new Team Project with Git support 

     

     Once the project is created press the "Navigate to projec"t button. 

2. Go to Code explorer and you will be able to see the the Git endpoint address. It might not show the git endpoint the first time but if you navigate away and try again you will see it.

3. Use the Git endpoint address to register a new Repository in MonoDevelop

4. Then just publish your solution using the registered repository. You can see all your files in Code Explorer and also all the commits:

Tip: If you want to use a more simple user name than you full live id you can enable your Alternate Credentials on the User Profile page 

The same Git endpoint can be also used to "Connect to a repository" in Xcode for your Obejctive C projects.

Thank you TFS TEAM for this great feature.

NAMASTE

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Mono is back

  Great news today... Mono is back. Looks like the Xamarin guys were able to convince Novell to take over the Mono project. You can read more on Miguel de Icaza post. Now the first thing I hope is to be able to reactivate my Monotouch license on my new Macbook (for more than two months I got no answer to my emails - Xamarin or Novell). Multiplatform mobile development... Sweet

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Get Monotouch with 15% discount

Apple decided to take out the restrictions introduced in the iOS Developer Program earlier this year making Monotouch a "SAFE" environment to develop apps for iOS. Novell is celebrating this decision by offering a 15% discount on Monotouch for the next two weeks. If you are interested just use the discount code "MONO-331" on http://monotouch.net/Store

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C# for Mobile Development

A long time without blogging but I have some ideas for my next two posts (will be on Windows Mobile). Today I wanted to talk about developing on mobile platforms. Two weeks ago I joined the Monodroid preview version. So in this moment a C# developer is able to develop on all 3 major mobile platforms (Microsoft, Apple and Google).

My personal opinion on each of the development platforms:

I will start with Android and Monodroid which is the newest arrived. The integration with Visual Studio 2010 is fabulous (they plan to integrate with MonoDevelop also). I was impressed of the "activity" on the Monodroid list since launching of the preview (I have almost 500 messages in 2 weeks and it's not a preview opened to everybody) and even if it's a really early version and most of the things don't work (I've tried to use threading and sqlite library to do some comparative tests but nothing worked) there are already good ideas and a lot of interest to develop on this platform. One of the most "nasty" aspects of Android is developing the UI but Daniel Cazzulino from Clarius Consulting proposed to realize a "fake" WPF UI control just to leverage the designer, and then have a custom serialization that would transform the XAML to the android markup (this way it would be possible to use Blend too). Another aspect about Monodroid that doesn't convince me is the fact that almost everything is a "proxy" to the correspondent Java object so when you run your program every object creates another object in Java and of course this influences on memory requirements and performance. I wanted to test the Sqlite library because is not a Java wrapper and I could have a speed comparison between the Java program and the same Monodroid program (when Sqlite will work I will post the results). Then there is the runtime which has to be installed on the device. So for now I would not pay for Monodroid just to be able to write code in C# which is linked to Java (of course personal opinion and a lot of things can change when they release the first version of Monodroid) .

Then there is iOS and Monotouch. This a "mature" platform arrived at version 3.0. I love the fact that in the end the code is compiled to native code so you won't loose performance. The developer designs the interface with Apple tools and then link them to C#. You have access to feautures missing in WP 7 v1 like sockets, database and the newest one that will come to iOS 4.2 is PRINTING (if you read my blog you probably know that I am pretty "obsessed" with database and printing). Let's hope Microsoft will take Apple example and implement missing features really fast (I am referring at games for mobile where Microsoft is ahead of everyone but Apple just announced on the 1st of September the Game center and my feeling is that Google is preparing something similar for Android 3.0 for the end of the year). I think Monotouch worth every penny the only doubt remains if Apple will ever "block" the apps developed in Monotouch (they don't have any reason, but I've seen some prepotent behavior from Apple lately). You will need a MAC for developing.

The last but not least is WP7. It's is the most integrated development platform. It has everything a developer needs for development (I am not referring to the missing features of WP7) and it's FREE. I am waiting for the first devices to hit the market and "play" some more (I would have loved to have a "test" device and blog about the experience with the phone from usability to development).

In the following weeks I will also test and blog about the new controls from Resco for WP7 and Monotouch.

NAMASTE

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