A couple months ago I decided to purchase an Apple G4 Laptop. One of the main things I wanted to do in all my spare time was to get Mono installed. A couple weeks ago I got around to installing Mono. The process was very smooth thanks to the .dmg download available on the go-mono.com website.
As I began playing around with Mono I realized that I missed the nice friendly confines of VS.NET. Believe it or not vi just wasn't cutting it. I began to search for a IDE I could use on my Mac. I tried XCode with the C# templates by Druware, which seemed like a decent environment but not quite what I was looking for. Next up was Eclipse with Improve's C# Plugin which was pretty nice. Good syntax highlighting, compile time errors with source code references (click on the error and it takes you to the source file), however, the Improve plugin required setting references on individual files which was very awkward and unnatural. After a little more playing with different build targets within Eclipse I began to browse around for another alternative. About a week ago I decided to try and get MonoDevelop running despite the warnings on the mono-project.com website that the process was not for the feint of heart (which I read as not for those just messing around in spare time). A week later I'm still attempting to get all the dependencies installed that MonoDevelop requires. Unfortunetly I missed the step in the instructions on go-mono.com that said to set fink to unstable mode. This led to installing a bunch of older components that didn't satisfy the requirements for the MonoDoc and MonoDevelop applications. Last night after about a day and a half of updates via fink (don't worry they just run I wasn't sitting their watching it for the whole time) I think I'm a couple installs away from having MonoDevelop running.
All this has me thinking about who I need to track down at Apple to get future versions of OS X to include Mono, as well as a nice IDE with syntax highlighting, code completion, and an integrated debugger. If you happen to know who that is let me know :-)