I finished off my daily TODO list at 2am this morning, including a new edition of Linux.Ars.

To celebrate, I wanted to start work on a little app I’ve been thinking about writing. I was about to fire up MonoDevelop when I noticed that the current version in Ubuntu was 0.5.1, but the latest stable version was 0.7.

The only major gripe I have with Ubuntu right now (and this isn’t anyone’s fault; Tseng rules and has done an awesome job getting Mono stuff into Universe) is that the Mono stuff is nowhere near as current as I want it to be (Hoary ships with 1.0.5). Mono 1.1.7 hit Breezy (the ultra unstable branch) recently, but even that is not without problems. I grabbed the latest tarball of MonoDevelop. It needed a newer version of gtk-sharp. The configure script for gtk-sharp couldn’t find a working Mono environment for some reason and fell back to looking for the Microsoft compiler csc.exe.

I decided to grab the latest installer for Mono. Very nice, by the way. I installed a fresh mono environment in my home directory and pointed gtk-sharp to it. That worked like a charm. I had to build newer versions of that, gtksourceview#, and gecko#, and then on to MonoDevelop.

I haven’t really kicked the tires yet but I can say that it feels faster than 0.5.1. It still amazes me at just how fast the Mono community works. It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago I was evaluating a pre-1.0 mono. Today, I use Tomboy heavily, I use f-spot to manage my photos (and I even wrote a patch for it that was accepted upstream), and Beagle to search for files. You guys rock.