Suggestion: Using MonoDevelop as a foundation to fast-track the project

[rafael-neri]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been following the project and I’d like to share a technical suggestion for you to consider. Building a full-featured IDE from scratch is an incredibly massive task, so it might be worth considering a fork of MonoDevelop as a starting point.

MonoDevelop is open-source (MIT) and already has the "heavy lifting" done—features that usually take years to mature:

• Project Management: Native support for .sln, .csproj, and MSBuild integration.
• IDE Architecture: Robust docking systems, solution trees, and a proven plugin model.
• Debugging Tools: It already has a solid debugging foundation, which is one of the hardest things to implement from scratch.

The idea would be to leverage this established codebase and focus the project's energy on modernizing the core for current .NET versions and C#. While the code has some legacy parts, refactoring and updating APIs is much faster today with the help of AI, compared to building every single component manually.

Just throwing this out there as a potential roadmap to make SharpIDE a fully functional tool much sooner.

Great work on the project so far!

[MattParkerDev]

Thanks for the suggestion.

MonoDevelop is actually LGPLv2, which concerns me that this post was written by AI. Please fact check LLM outputs in future :)

Similarly, SharpIDE already supports Solutions, C# Projects and MSBuild, a solution tree, and debugging via SharpDbg.

I don't think I will be considering a major pivot like this, at this stage of the project :)

[lextm]

@MattParkerDev Actually, the MonoDevelop source code is dual-licensed, and the situation is fairly complex for historical reasons.

I wrote a detailed summary during the MonoDevelop-to-dotdevelop migration to help clarify the licensing questions.

@rafael-neri I don’t think it makes much sense to build anything new on top of MonoDevelop/dotdevelop at this point, for several reasons:

1. GTK is sadly a moving target. Major GTK releases are known for breaking changes, and each generation comes with its own set of bindings. Spending time on UI migration alone brings little real value, even if AI tools can reduce some of the effort.
2. The extension ecosystem was proven but is gone. The MonoDevelop / Xamarin Studio / Visual Studio for Mac extension world has effectively disappeared. There are no meaningful up-to-date extensions left to port, and the same is true for SharpDevelop.
3. The IDE landscape has changed. MonoDevelop was created in a very different era, before LSP, DAP, and other editor/IDE protocols became mature and widely adopted. Many of its subsystems were tightly coupled to old Mono/Xamarin implementations that are no longer maintained, while other parts have simply been superseded by much simpler approaches such as LSP. So I don’t think the old idea that “these things usually take years to mature” still holds. SharpIDE already shows that, today, useful results can be achieved in weeks or months, especially since many relevant Visual Studio components (Roslyn, MSBuild, .NET Project System, etc) were open-sourced years ago.

At this point, it seems more reasonable to let MonoDevelop rest and focus on SharpIDE itself.

Visual Studio for Windows and Visual Studio Code already expose large and modern extension ecosystems. If SharpIDE gradually builds a compatible enough extension API surface, many extensions could be ported with relatively little effort. I used #99 as the first experiment. And if you can import VS Code extensions like vscode-jetbrains-icon-theme directly in SharpIDE (which requires some effort but not too much), isn't that cool?

[rafael-neri]

@MattParkerDev @lextm

Thanks for the clarification!

Just to add some context from my side:

I'm not really a C# developer - I mostly work with PHP, JS and Go. I'm currently revisiting C#, and my last real contact with it was back in college, which was quite a while ago. Back then I used MonoDevelop on Linux and had good memories of it, which is why it came to mind when I saw SharpIDE.

Also, yes - I did use AI to help me write the message since English isn’t my native language. I can read and understand it fairly well, but I still rely on AI sometimes to help structure what I want to say. I’ll definitely double-check technical details like licensing next time.

That said, my suggestion mainly came from genuine enthusiasm about the project. Since MonoDevelop is gone and I always enjoyed using full IDEs, seeing a new initiative like SharpIDE got me excited enough to throw the idea out there.

Anyway, really cool project — wishing you the best with it!