Python Programming

Working with Visual Studio or MonoDevelop

Visual Studio Express is free to download and use, but you have to choose which language you'll be developing with. There are separate versions for C#, C++, VB.NET, and web development, but you can have several different versions of Visual Studio Express installed on the same machine. If you have Visual Studio Professional, then you don't have to make a choice, as it supports all of the standard .NET languages. Figure 14.1 shows a new class library being created with the VB.NET version of Visual Studio Express.

MonoDevelop is an IDE written with the GNOME user-interface toolkit, and it works with Linux or Mac OS X.4 It supports C, C#, and VB.NET and is included in the Mono package for Mac OS X. Figure 14.2 shows MonoDevelop in use editing a C# project. Let's use these IDEs to create objects we can use from IronPython.

Figure 14.1 The VB.NET version of Visual Studio Express

3 It is technically possible but very difficult to get MonoDevelop working on Windows. SharpDevelop is a good open source .NET IDE for Windows.

4 It is possible to compile MonoDevelop for Windows, but it has a lot of dependencies. It is likely that prebuilt binaries for Windows will be made available as MonoDevelop matures.

Figure 14.2 MonoDeveiop on Mac OS X, editing a C# console project