Monthly Archive for August, 2009

I wrote a small addin last evening for all the beautiful MonoDevelop users. This allows you to send your code (either the whole file or a selection) to PasteBin.com from right inside the IDE.

Here’s a quick screenshot:

This is the first of many text-editor productivity centric addins I hope to release in the future. You can find the code here: http://github.com/ninjagod/MonoDevelop.EditorTools/tree/master. The code is under the MIT/X11 license.

To build, check out MonoDevelop.EditorTools into extras, and build against a built copy of MonoDevelop (and make sure that the newer version of the assemblies are present in your search path). This has been tested against trunk. It builds an addin directly into main/build/addins. I hope to merge this into the MonoDevelop trunk though it’s a really really small feature.

Still to be finxed: 1. The “Copy link” button does not work because I don’t know how to use the clipboard through C#. 2. I need to retrieve the user’s name from the settings 3. I need to remember things like subdomain, name, etc and load them up from a PropertyBag.

And the elusive download link: PasteBinHelper.dll [via] (You can put this in the md-trunk/main/build/Addins/MonoDevelop.EditorTools/PasteBinHelper.dll) and it should work. Since the Addin specifically requests assemblies of version 2.1.0 (trunk), it might not work with 2.0 (don’t let that stop you from trying though)

Sometime in late May, I embarked upon a project to extend MonoDevelop, an open-source C# IDE, to give it Task-context functionality and integration with Bug-trackers, not unlike what Eclipse’s Mylyn provides.

7630 lines of code, and several times my bodyweight in Coffee later, there’s something to show for my work. This may be the end of the program, but I am going to continue working on this for several months to come. After some more testing, I’ll release a very small preview version with some of the unstable/experimental features phased out on the MonoDevelop mailing lists. It’s still far, far, far from complete. It needs several months of work before I’m happy with what it can do, but the basic skeleton is starting to take shape, allowing me to focus more on features rather than worry about the backend.

I had several issues during the program – primarily the fact that I was interning at a company and had to do this on evenings, and weekends – which became extremely tiring. Add to that, the horrid Bangalore traffic, two hour commutes, etc, it became pretty hard. Moving closer to the office with a relative provided some respite. While it would’ve been ideal to hack on my code in the evenings at the office, I couldn’t for legal reasons, so I would hang out at a friend’s place nearby and occasionally work at his place.

My mentor, Michael Hutchinson was so overwhelmingly helpful, it was almost a little embarrassing. When he was unavailable for sometime in the middle, I almost started panicking; it’s really not easy wrestling with such a huge codebase. The other folks over at #monodevelop were incredibly helpful and patient as well. There was one time when I spent two weeks on the backend trying to refactor the code over from a serialization-based storage system to a Database storage system, because the former wouldn’t work because of some circular-dependency constraints. Thanks to some help from the guys on the channel, I realized my woes can be cured by a simple API call I didn’t know about, and thus threw away two weeks worth of work, and moved things back to the old backend. (though in the long run the database would’ve been excruciatingly painful to work with)

Anyways, I need to do some more housekeeping, add some comments here and there and maybe an easter egg or two.

Sneak preview

Again, this is a very early version and will be subject to massive changes. I will write again soon describing what it’s all about.