Future of Monobjc
14 09 2008Monobjc is more than one year old, and the time has come to go beyond the Monobjc bridge. In order to develop the .NET programming on Mac OS X, a bridge is not enough. A whole development ecosystem is needed, so any new developer will have all the necessary tools to leverage the power of .NET on Mac OS X. I have identified several tools needed when developing applications:
- IDE: An IDE is great as it speeds up the edition on multiple document and centralized the application development (code writing, compilation and packaging). Unfortunatly, an IDE is a very complex machinery. Identified solutions: fork SharpDevelop or MonoDevelop.
- Reflector: A tool like Red Gate Reflector is useful when dealing with assemblies. The though part is to write the IL reverse-engineering engine. Identified solution: a Reflector clone based on Mono Cecil.
- Obfuscator: When distributing applications, obfuscation is an additional mesaure to protect your investment. Identified solution: an obfuscation tool based on Mono Cecil.
The ecosystem can also be completed by libraries either based on Mac OS X framework (Sparkle, Growl, ...) or existing .NET libraries. Stay tuned as now, the goals for Monobjc are clear.