Yes, I have tested MonoVS with the version 0.2.2641 (on both client and server). I installed OpenSuse 11.1 and added the MonoVS software repository, and everything worked ! I would have prefer to get it from SVN in order to use it in my Debian hosts but the mono development team seems to have removed it from their SVN repository.
So, the Mono Remote Debugger for Visual Studio works, but there still some bugs. Deployment is super fast and it copies all the required DLL.
Remote debugging can be used (launching it is really fast too), but has some bugs, here are the ones I could find :
-
On the classical mouse hover debugging popup, the expandable element “Non-public members” is always empty if available. If not available, every private member is displayed like any other public member variable.
-
In my first tests, the “watch” window wouldn’t allow any variable to be expanded.
-
If you have a variable not yet declared (but available) in the watch window and try to expand it, debugging just stops without any warning
-
Sometimes, when I stop debugging I get a message saying something went wrong and the debugger might be unstable
-
Once, after making a pause and then a stop, it totally crashed Visual Studio (but it only happened once).
And this is not really a bug, but unhandled exception are displayed in the dirty popup. This isn’t pretty.
If do “Run remotely in Mono”, it will display the Console output in the server’s console. If you do “Debug remotely in Mono”, the Console output is redirect the Debug output window.
This tool is still in private beta (I guess anyone has a good chance to be accepted like I was), but it can already help a lot of people. Even if you just use the Remote Running (which includes deploying the assembly), it still worth using this tool.