MonoDevelop

» see monodevelop.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

MonoDevelop died the way community software dies. There was no announcement and no farewell page, just one line at the top of a repository saying it is now read only. The date on that line is 4 october 2021, and by then it had not been built or maintained for almost two years.

It began in late 2003 as a port. SharpDevelop was a free C# editor that only ran on Windows, and somebody moved it to GTK so it would run on Linux, which is the least romantic origin a piece of software can have. It became the editor for the Mono project, the reimplementation of.NET that Miguel de Icaza's team had started at Ximian, and for most of the next decade it was the answer to a narrow but real question: you have a Linux machine and you have to write C#.

It grew past C# eventually, with support for F# and C and C++ and Vala, and it picked up the things an IDE is expected to have, a debugger and a visual designer for GTK interfaces. None of that is why anyone remembers it. What made it matter was that it was the only serious option, and that Mono kept getting more capable underneath it.

I have written software for a living since my twenties, and this is a name I know without ever having leaned on it. In the years MonoDevelop was the answer,.NET on Linux was an argument before it was a tool, and most of the people I would have talked to about it were arguing rather than installing. I watched that argument from the outside and my own work went elsewhere.

~ the case file ~

~ the mono argument ~

The fight over Mono ran for most of a decade and it was not about the IDE. Microsoft had published the specification for C# and the runtime as standards, but the surrounding libraries were not covered, and a large part of the free software world believed the whole project was a patent trap waiting to close. De Icaza spent years answering that in public.

The argument was settled by acquisition rather than by anyone winning it. Microsoft bought Xamarin in 2016, and the company that might have sued became the company signing the paychecks. What is easy to forget now, when C# on Linux is unremarkable, is how much of that outcome was carried for years by a small team maintaining a runtime and an editor that most people thought was a bad idea.

~ the ide that became three products ~

Version 4 arrived in 2013 renamed as Xamarin Studio, because Xamarin now had a business selling cross-platform mobile development and needed the editor to carry the brand. The open source MonoDevelop continued alongside it, with the commercial build pulling ahead.

After the 2016 acquisition Microsoft did it again. Visual Studio for Mac, announced that november, was not Visual Studio ported to the Mac at all. It was this codebase with the Visual Studio name on it and Microsoft's own compiler and build system wired in underneath. So a GTK port of a Windows hobby editor ended up shipping as the Mac version of Microsoft's flagship product, which is a strange enough career for any piece of software. Microsoft retired that one on 31 august 2024.

~ inside unity, without being chosen ~

The widest reach it ever had was in a place nobody picked it. Unity bundled a fork called MonoDevelop-Unity as the script editor in its installer, so for years anyone who downloaded Unity and double clicked a C# file got MonoDevelop whether they had heard of it or not. A generation of people who made small games have opinions about this editor and never learned its full name.

Unity unbundled it in 2018.1 and made Visual Studio the default on both platforms, which on the Mac meant Visual Studio for Mac. The replacement for MonoDevelop was MonoDevelop with a different label, and the joke was entirely lost on the release notes.

~ the last commit ~

The final open source release was 7.6.9 in september 2018. Development effectively stopped in january 2020, and for the next year and a half the repository sat there accumulating issues from people trying to build it on newer distributions, where it no longer compiled and could not be installed.

Then in october 2021 someone flipped the archive switch. There is an issue in the tracker titled to say the project has been archived, and that is the entire obituary the project got from its owners. The code is not gone, of course, none of it ever is. It just stopped being something anyone was responsible for.

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