After getting sick and tired of Visual Studio 2010 crashes and snail like performance I was open to look for a different IDE. Luckily, I found MonoDevelop! I immediately downloaded it for my Windows 7 (Virtual) machine. It took almost no time to install and run crazy fast. As, a developer I am not interested in all the glamour provided in Visual Studio. I just needed an IDE which runs and does not crash after every 5 minutes.

I downloaded MonoDevelop version 2.4 and created an ASP.NET MVC 2 application. One of the problems I encountered was that the assembly version for ASP.NET MVC was 2.0 but in the web.config it was still pointing to 1.0. That was not such a big deal as I updated the web.config and everything started working fine.

After the success of MonoDevelop on Windows 7 I downloaded MonoDevelop for Mac OSX. The MonoDevelop for Mac uses some older Mono Framework version which only supported ASP.NET MVC 1.0 framework. Thanks to the tweet from Miguel de Icaza which pointed me to Mono 2.8. I quickly downloaded Mono 2.8 using the following link:

Mono Framework 2.8

I installed the Mono 2.8 framework and then restarted MonoDevelop. Unfortunately, that did not seemed to fix the problem. The MVC project was still under ASP.NET MVC 1.0. I thought that maybe I needed to create a new project from scratch and then maybe MonoDevelop will pick up the newer version of ASP.NET MVC assemblies but that too ended in failure. Finally, I manually removed the references of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 from the project and added new references to the 2.0 assembly. As, mentioned previously I also had to update the web.config file inside the Views folder to reflect this change.

After making this change my application was converted to ASP.NET MVC 2.0. I am really looking forward in working with MonoDevelop.

Thanks to the MonoDevelop team on excellent work!