In the first two parts of this series, we have taken an initial look at Oxygene “Nougat” from the compiler side. Today, i want to delve deeper into some aspects of the IDE experience for Nougat.
[](http://blog.lemonpi.net/?tag=nougat)
We have gotten a lot of questions about our IDE plans for Nougat over the past few weeks. As you know, right now Oxygene for .NET and for Java both focus on Visual Studio as an IDE, and — at least for the time being — so will Nougat. There are a lot of arguments for and against different IDE choices, but it really boils down to resources: we have a great and solid IDE experience for Oxygene in Visual Studio already that Nougat gets to inherit relatively easy, and there’s only so many things we can do at once. So for “1.0”, the initial Nougat release, we are focusing on the compiler and tool chain, leveraging our existing IDE.
For the future (2013 and beyond), we are looking at additional IDE options — not just for Nougat, but for all three target platforms, however, it’s too early to talk about those ideas yet.
Nougat in Visual Studio
So what does Nougat in Visual Studio look like? Well, pretty familiar ;). If you’ve used any of the other two editions of Oxygene before, you will feel right at home with Nougat. You will start creating new apps using one of the included project templates, of course:
And once you start coding, you get all the great IDE features you know and love — from code completion to inline errors:
Just as in .NET and Java, Solution Explorer is the central point for managing your project (the only giveaway being the green tint in the project and code file icons).
Under the References node in Solution Explorer, you manage the Frameworks (or libraries) that your project links against. Need to reference another framework? Easy, just choose “Add Reference”, and you get a list of all the frameworks provided by the SDK your project is targeting — or you can browse to add other frameworks, for example third party libraries such as [Data Abstract](http://remobjects.com/da/xcode).
As discussed in the [previous post](http://blogs.remobjects.com/blogs/mh/2012/09/21/p4801), Oxygene uses .fx files that provide a sort of “pre-compiled header” cache of which members are exposed by the frameworks, and Nougat (in its current alpha build) ships with ready-to-go support for OS X 10.6 thru 10.8 and iOS 5.1 and iOS 6.0 (but you will be able to seamlessly work with newer SDKs when they come out, w/o needing us to update Nougat with explicit support).
In “Project Properties”, one of the options you will find is the SDK selector. You can select a generic SDK name (such as “iOS” or “OS X”) and Nougat will link against the newest version of that SDK type it finds (the equivalent of selecting “Latest” in Xcode), or you can select a specific Target SDK, say “OS X 10.7”
So now you’ve written your app — what’s next? You’ll want to build and run it, of course. Nothing easier than that. Nougat comes with a helper application codenamed “CrossBox” that you can run on your Mac(s). Nougat’s IDE integration will automatically find any local Mac running CrossBox and let you deploy and run your Mac applications there. Ditto for iOS applications, where CrossBox will let you select the simulator or any attached iOS device and run your app on there — simply by pressing “Start”.
If your Mac is not on the local network (maybe you have one hosted with [MacMiniColo](http://macminicolo.net) who have a very awesome [special offer](http://macminicolo.net/thetalkshow) this week), or are renting a Mac via [MacInCloud](http://www.macincloud.com), Nougat won’t find that Mac automatically, but you can of course manually connect to it by specifying its address.
Mac-side, CrossBox provides nice, Mac-native UI to let you know what’s going on, including Notification Center support on Mountain Lion, when your apps start or stop running, etc.
## Summary
Ok, so this has been a summary of the Nougat IDE experience, on Speed. Stay tuned for our next part, where we take a closer look at the build-and-debug process!