* Tools We need a number of tools to make people productive using a Mono-based solution. Some of these tools can be developed on Windows before Mono is fully finished. All of these tools should be written using C#. For the tools that are typically command line tools: Try to write these as components that could load their input from streams or collections of streams, and implement the command line tools as wrappers around those classes. For example, we will be making the C# compiler a component that could be reused by applications that might have a use for the various bits of the compiler (either to embed the compiler, or reuse the code generator part of it). This is important so that these components (compiler, assembler, linker, etc) can be integrated later into the visual development environment (hopefully with the help of the SharpDevelop hackers). TODO=ilasm,IL Assembler ** IL Assembler. This assembler should basically take as input a file containing IL bytecodes as specified in the `Partition II' of the ECMA spec, and produce a binary file. TODO=al,Assembly Linker ** Assembly Linker. This tool is used to construct assemblies, which are basically deployment units for CLI executables. TODO=debugger,Debugger ** Debugger We will need a debugging API to debug CLI applications and then a debugger component that can be used in an IDE environment. TODO=ide,Integrated Development Environment ** Integrated Development Environment There is already a project to create a C# development environment: SharpDevelop. People should work with the SharpDevelop hackers to produce a unified development environment. Please work with the SharpDevelop hackers to build a good IDE. We will work on creating an embedable compiler component and an embeddable debugger component that can be used withing SharpDevelop TODO=hbrowser,Help Browser ** Help Browser We need a good help browser that can be used to browse documentation. Ideally this help browser can accept as input XML Docbook input and an assorted set of file formats (Microsoft Help, Unix manual pages, Unix Info pages) Look at the GNOME DevHelp for a good set of ideas on how to implement this.