VSPrj2make is undergoing one of the biggest overhauls since it was first made available for download back in late 2004. Here are some highlights of what I am working on:

* Eliminate a prerequisite installation of MonoLaunch, the mono runtime selector for Windows. This will be accomplished by folding a lot of the functionality right inside of the add-in and/or including some of the executable files like monoLaunchC.exe and monoLaunchW.exe in the destination directory where VSPrj2make installs during its initial installation.

* Add support to prj2makewin32.exe, the platform specific version of prj2make that ships with the add-in, to create the new MonoDevelop solution and project files (*.mds and *.mdp). This will be a time for me to also look into creating makefiles local to a subdirectory instead of creating them at the parent directory level.

* Will try to add an Inno Setup script creation capability so that a new distribution unit (a bonefide setup.exe), will be introduced.

* Support for "Test in Mono (Linux)". This will be a new feature that will be enabled when the presence of the VMware mono appliance is detected on the host computer.

The last bullet item refers to a project that I have been working on for some weeks now. The idea of a mono appliance is to have a VMware virtual machine that is based on OpenSUSE 10.1 and includes a very complete mono runtime and development environment. The mono appliance will include Apache 2.0 with pre-configured SSL and mod_mono. Ideally, it will also have a mechanism like rug/red-carpet to facilitate the upgrade of mono to the latest releases with the greatest ease. It becomes apparent that a service or daemon must exist to launch applications in Linux for testing purposes. The Visual Studio add-in will then have the knowledge and correct privileges to interact with this daemon.

Early working prototypes of these tools should be available sometime in June (right around the Mono 1.2 release). Because of its size, you can anticipate that this system will likely be distributed as a DVD ISO image (we are currently looking at about 1.4 GB compressed file set), or a 30 plus files multi-part Inno Setup executable.

Visual Studio 2005 version of the Add-in

Right around the time when I begin adding some VS 2005 C# project file format support to prj2makewin32.exe, should be the time when I take a serious look at creating a VS 2005 version of the Add-in.

Finally, once I reach the mono runtime selection functionality from within the add-in -- should be in about 2 more weeks), we will begin hosting the source code for monoLaunch and VSPrj2make in mono project's svn trunk repository. Miguel suggested we create a home for these called "wintools".