SyntaxTree 22 Feb 2012

Or “What I have been up to since last September”. It is no secret that the middle of 2011 was a bumpy time for the Mono team. But let's not babble about something that happened months ago. Suffices to say that September the 15th was my last day at Novell. I started contributing to Mono in 2005. In 2007, at 24, after being part of the two very first editions of the Google Summer of Code, I was hired full-time. I had an amazing time working this long on a project I deeply care about. I'm proud of what we've accomplished during this time. And I'm super happy to see how great my friends at Xamarin are doing. Yesterday I was stuck on a plane for quite a long time, and a guy in front of me tinkered for an entire hour in iCircuit, an amazing application based on MonoTouch. As a member of the original MonoTouch team, it felt awesome! Yet, after the dust settled, I felt like it was time to try something new. Something I've been thinking about for quite a while now. Even though I've been doing a lot of thinking and planning, it took quite a leap of faith, and quite a bit of work.

Introducing SyntaxTree

SyntaxTree is a company whose mission is twofold: write great developer tools and help other companies doing so. We obviously have a very strong background on the Microsoft .NET and Mono platforms, but we've already been helping clients target some very different platforms. You're more than welcome to check SyntaxTree's services page out to have a look at the kind of work we've been doing. And today we announce our first product, UnityVS, bridging two amazing tools, Unity, and Visual Studio. If you don't already know about it, Wikipedia defines Unity as “an integrated authoring tool for creating 3D video games or other interactive content such as architectural visualizations or real-time 3D animations”. It uses Mono as a scripting engine and Unity has been part of the Mono community for a long while now. Our product, UnityVS adds support in Visual Studio for the languages that programmers can use in Unity to write scripts for their game: UnityScript and Boo. UnityVS also adds support for debugging your scripts inside Visual Studio, even when running inside Unity's editor. I can not stress enough how big of a Unity fan I am. I think that what those guys are achieving, especially towards beginners, is nothing short of amazing. Would Unity have been around when I was 15, instead of writing PHP and JavaScript code, I'm pretty sure I would have spent nights tinkering in Unity, and my career would have ended up to be quite different. And they happen to have a fantastic taste when it comes to third party code. Using Mono as a scripting engine? Awesome. Using a JavaScript like language based on the Boo compiler infrastructure? Still awesome. Using Mono.Cecil to the point that they use the word “to cecil [in|out]” as a verb internally? Even more awesome. Using ILSpy's engine to retarget .net code to ActionScript for their Flash port? Mind blowing. I'm very excited to work on a product which complements the Unity ecosystem, I hope you'll like it.