MonoTools adds soft debugger

Version 2.0 introduces profile based deployment and supports running and debugging on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms.

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MonoVS Server running alongside Microsoft Visual Studio.

MonoTools for Visual Studio is a commercial add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio that enables developers to write .NET applications for non-Windows platforms within their preferred development environment. It allows developers to build, debug and deploy .NET applications on Linux, while continuing to leverage the extensive ecosystem of code, libraries, and tools available for .NET.

Updates in 2.0

• Soft Debugger
  One of the biggest changes for MonoTools 2.0 (at least under the hood) is that Novell has switched to Mono's new Soft Debugger. The soft debugger was originally released for MonoTouch, allowing developers to remotely debug applications running on Mono on the iPhone. Unlike the traditional "hard debugger" (mdb), which operates outside of the Mono runtime to start and pause an application and poke at memory contents, the soft debugger is built into the Mono runtime and cooperates with the runtime to provide the necessary functionality to the debugger. Platform Support - The biggest benefit of supporting the soft debugger in MonoTools is that users can now use Visual Studio to debug Mono running Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Debugging Mono on Windows is an especially important improvement because it can simplify the porting process. When porting an application to Mono, Novell always recommended people port first to Mono on Windows to find any differences between Mono and .NET, and then port to Mono on Linux to find any differences between Windows and Linux; however, the lack of local debugging support on Windows in MonoTools 1.x made it difficult to take this approach.
• Better Debugging Experience
  The debugger in MonoTools 2.0 also adds several features that were notably absent, including support for adding or removing breakpoints while running, and support for setting a breakpoints in partial constructors (most commonly effecting the Windows.Forms designer in Visual Studio).
• Profile-Based Deployment
  MonoTools 2.0 introduces MonoTools Server Profiles. Profiles allow you to save your frequently used servers (and local Mono instances) so you can easily switch between them. Think of them like "bookmarks" for your servers, saving you the effort of keying server names/ip addresses, or waiting on Mono Tools to find nearby servers. However, profiles can store more than just the server address. Each profile can have completely independent settings, allowing you to set up things like IOMAP, so you can quickly switch between profiles with case-sensitivity enabled or disabled. You may also note a few new settings are available. Novell got several feature requests for allowing applications to be run with arbitrary environment variables or arguments passed to Mono, which can now be assigned per-profile.
• Deployment Speed
  Another new improvement in MonoTools 2.0 is deployment speed. In 1.1, Novell introduced an improvement that saved the step of recopying files to the server if they were unchanged since the last run. This helped considerably, but copying files could still be unacceptably slow at times. For 2.0, this has been totally rewritten from scratch. Novell now copy files over HTTP instead of remoting. Now MonoTools not only copies files that have changed since the last run, it also compresses all files into one zip file that is then transfered to the server. For the usual test case of BlogEngine.NET, it could take up to 30 seconds to copy for a first run in MonoTools 1.0/1.1. In 2.0, it takes about 1-2 seconds to compress the code, send it, and decompress it. Subsequent, unchanged runs are nearly instantaneous, making the "debug, fix, test" cycle much faster.
• Platform Support
  MonoTools 2.0 supports both running and debugging on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms. This should make it easier to target every desktop platform.

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