I am going to get aggressive with the work needed to get Gtk# application development under Visual Studio .NET 2003. I am interested on this only because I know that step-debugging a la Visual Studio is just so useful.
I have achieved this already with the help of three or so unpublished batch files I wrote for the combined Mono Installer for Win32. I must admit that in the end I was having to set the local attribute to True for gtk-sharp library assemblies that my application was referencing to. This became necessary in order to have the full debugging experience work as it feels when doing a System.Windows.Forms application.
Now some of you may say that in such case I may have not really achieved the ideal behavior. What I say is that my aim is to afford development ease for Mono developers that live in Linux but visit Windows. It is also intended for those Windows Developers that want to have a guaranteed working application developed while using Windows but will ultimately be deployed to Linux.
Don't get me wrong, there are some fine people on the case already. The beauty of Open Source development in a community project is that it allows for parallel efforts to exist. In the end, good Internet citizens and community contributors will share notes and/or merge the product of their efforts for everyones benefit.
Some of you have seen my proposal for a prj2make-sharp Visual Studio .NET Add-in. This will be a companion adding to the Mono Combined Installer for Win32. I have also been thinking of Application templates like Gtk# application or Glade# Application that could display when you select new Solution/Project from the Visual Studio File/New/Project... menu.
For now, it is all about creating a renewable source of Windows 2000 Pro configurations. My weekend has been spent on playing with Drive Image 2002, Partition Magic 8 and MS Virtual PC 2004, on a Compaq Armada M700 notebook that has a 12 GB hard disk. This is to create disk images with combinations and variations of Win2k SP4, Visual Studio .NET 2003, MS .NET Framework 1.1 SDK, Cygwin, etc. Not a lot of fun.
I know that this sound cruel and unusual, but by the time you get this development system remember it was tested on a very humble and puny system so if it woks acceptable there, it will work very nicely on a real computer.