To ensure that developers everywhere get the most out of their upcoming holidays, we have released to our Beta channel new versions of MonoTouch, MonoDevelop and Mono.
You can pick and choose which components you want to try out, they can be installed independently of each other, and will allow you to try out different things. What follows will give you an overview of what you can expect in each one of the betas.
The Tastiest Treat
The tastiest of the treats is the Mono beta release. This beta release contains an incremental update to Mono (2.10.7) and also a completely new Gtk+ stack.
The new Gtk+ stack was developed by a Lanedo/Xamarin collaboration and fixes hundreds of rendering glitches and usability problems that have plagued MonoDevelop for years. Lanedo is a company that specializes in Gtk+ and have among their staff some of the key developers in Gtk+ and with their expertise they have vastly improved the MacOS port of Gtk+ and fixed many of the bugs that our users have filed over the past few months.
The Gtk+ improvements are not limited to bug fixes and glitch fixing. Lanedo has also implemented Smooth Scrolling for our Lion users.
We are putting this on the Beta channel because we want to gather your feedback and fix any major issues that might have escaped our testing process before we make this the default.
MonoTouch
The MonoTouch 5.1.1 release has been updated to the latest version of MonoTouch.Dialog, added System.IO.MemoryMappedFiles (due to a build error, we did not ship it in 5.1.0) and comes with key components that will be unlocked by the next stable release of MonoDevelop next week (stay tuned for these changes!)
MonoDevelop Beta
This is truly a beta, we are using the Beta channel of MonoDevelop to allow users to try out the new code-completion engine of MonoDevelop. This new codecompletion engine has been written entirely on top of Mono’s Compiler as a Service and should be more precise, handle more scenarios and provide better completions.