MonoDevelop 3.0 - looks like it's going to rock!

Those of us who use Linux-based operating systems, have certainly heard about the default (and probably the best to run on our systems) IDE for Mono - MonoDevelop.

I just installed the recently released Monodevelop 3.0 and, among its features, there are two I'd like to highlight.

Semantic syntax highlighting

Don't know about you, but to my taste, Monodevelop's ability to highlight the syntax was kind of poor. Up to now. MonoDevelop 3.0 can do some semantic analysis, e.g. putting unknown types in red

This is great news for us TDDers who are doing Need Driven Design. We use types that don't yet exist VERY often in our executable specifications AKA unit tests - this way we discover new abstractions and collaboration models. We tend to create new classes and methods AFTER we use them, so it's great to distinguish the ones we already have from the ones we have just discovered.

And to create those types and methods, we can certainly use...

Better refactoring support

Once we have discovered all the types and methods we need, we create them using IDE refactorings. I'm delighted to discover that MonoDevelop's Create Class and Create Method - basic tools for every TDDer - work more reliable in 3.0 than in previous versions (I have encountered versions of MonoDevelop that didn't have these refactorings at all!).

Which are also available as quick fixes:

That's it, I just wanted to share this wonderful news with you, at the same time explaining the basic mechanics for ultraproductive use of Need Driven Design under the hood. Have fun!