Creating A Simple Solution

Terminology

• Solution: a group of MonoDevelop Projects. This information is stored in an xml formatted file with the extension '.mds' in your solution directory. Note: a Solution can contain Solutions.
• Project: a buildable target. Either a library or an executable. It is comprised of source code files, references to libraries, and resource files (such as images). This information is stored in an xml formatted file with the extension '.mdp' in your solution directory.

Setting the Startup Project

Now we have two projects in our solution: an executable and a library. A solution can have multiple executable projects. You can specify the startup project (i.e. the project which is built and run when using the "Run" command) by right clicking on the Solution icon in the Solution pad and choosing "Options", then Common->Startup Properties. From there you can select single or multiple projects:

A solution with multiple projects will build and execute all of them in the order you specify. However, we want to set our startup application to "MyApplication" because this is the executable that we want to run.

Referencing our Library

If we are going to be able to use our new library, MonoDevelop needs to know this. We do this by adding a reference to it. From the Solution Pad, expand the node for our project "MyApplication", this will reveal a References node among others. Right click this and select "Edit References". This will bring up the References dialog. Select the "Project" tab. Our library should appear in the list, and we can check it as so:

Click "Ok". Now we have all the classes in our library "MyLibrary" available to our application (exactly one). Let's test this by creating an instance of the class "MyClass". Add the following to MyApplication->Main.cs:

// project created on 01/19/2006 at 14:19
using System;
using MyLibrary;

class MainClass
{
	public static void Main(string[] args)
	{
		MyClass test = new MyClass (); 

		Console.WriteLine("Hello {0}", test); 
	}
}

Our Library in Action

Finally, we can build and run our application, which should produce the following output:

Hello MyLibrary.MyClass

Building from the Command Line

As of MonoDevelop version 0.9, it is possible to build your solution from the command line. Using the above example, we could do:

mdtool build --f --buildfile:MyApplication/MyApplication.mds

Which will produce:

MyApplication/MyApplication.mds
MonoDevelop Build Tool
Loading combine: /home/scottell/Projects/MyApplication/MyApplication.mds
   Loading project: /home/scottell/Projects/MyApplication/MyApplication.mdp
   Loading project: /home/scottell/Projects/MyLibrary/MyLibrary.mdp
Building Solution MyApplication
   Building Project: MyLibrary Configuration: Debug
      Performing main compilation...
      Build complete -- 0 errors, 0 warnings
   Building Project: MyApplication Configuration: Debug
      Performing main compilation...
      Build complete -- 0 errors, 0 warnings