Paquito is back in Korea, after having spent a week and some change with us here in Texas. We had a great time, and we will never forget the memories generated by his visit. "Dios te bendiga mijo".

I have begun writing a Visual Studio .NET Add-in that will be a good companion for Mono and hopefully assist in the deployment of source code archives that can be compiled at their destinations without the need of having Visual Studio installed. My original design goals are modest and few. The add-in will:

• Be a self contained unit with as few external dependencies as possible.
• Create Makefiles suitable for nmake.exe and/or gmake.
• Import MonoDevelop Solutions.
• Generate or Export the current solution to MonoDevelop.
• Test in Mono.
• Provide a GUI facility to change settings and the like for the add-in itself.

Now let me do a quick elaboration on some of the points above. The first bullet talks about being self contained. By that I mean to have the MSI (or the more likely NSIS) package use to distribute and installed the add-in have nothing more than a single library assembly (.dll). I don�t want to have dependencies from binary versions of prj2make-sharp stand alone programs or conflicts with it if it resides on the same computer.

Nothing else is required, to create Makefiles that target the nmake.exe build tool. However, when generating Makefiles intended to be used by gmake in *NIX environments, I may provide a setting for users to specify the base directory where Mono 1.0 should be found. The setting will be pre-populated with /usr/lib.

As usual I am running a bit late for work and will continue and/or finish discussing the remaining four points in a future blog entry.