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When comparing MonoDevelop vs B4X, the Slant community recommends B4X for most people. In the question“What are the best tools for making a cross-platform application?” B4X is ranked 1st while MonoDevelop is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose B4X is:
B4XUI custom views are designed, by Erel and other forum members, exactly with this in mind; custom views that act and feel exactly the same no matter what platform you target.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free
MonoDevelop is free to download and use.
Pro Starting up this program doesn't take as long as starting Visual Studio windows 98
Pro Create easy, fast cross-platform views with less code
B4XUI custom views are designed, by Erel and other forum members, exactly with this in mind; custom views that act and feel exactly the same no matter what platform you target.
Pro Powerful general purpose programming tool
As mentioned in its website, "With B4X, anyone who wants to, can develop real-world solutions."
Pro A very active forum where you can find any issue you have, and quick answers to new ones
Pro A highly motivated program author who is very active in the forums
Erel Uziel is simply the most pro-active Soft-Creator/Forum Manager you will ever come across. If it has not yet been asked & answered, just ask and you will be answered withing minutes, and thanks to it being a trully international forum, this is achieved 24h/7d.
Pro Very easy to use and powerful for IoT
Support for Bluetooth/BLE, MQTT, TCP/UDP, Serial, NFC, Websockets, HTTP/2 across platforms makes it the ideal tool for IoT projects.
Pro Live code swapping
A huge productivity boost when you can run your apps on the devices and make code changes real time without needing to recompile.
Pro No complexities compared with other tools
No need to learn JAVA, C+, PHP, or any other complementary languages in order to achieve exactly what you need.
Pro The best all round
Produces highly optimised end results. Easy to use and quick to learn. When you know how to produce an Android app you near enough know how to produce an IOS app.
The fact that there are subtle differences between writing for different platforms is a huge plus - those differences help optimise your code and they're really not difficult to wrap your head round.
Pro Erel has much passion for his tool
The speed of answer topics is amazing.
Pro Many informative video tutorials
The tutorials help beginners as well as more experienced programmers grasping important concepts.
Pro Many code examples of fully working apps for free
The Forum is filled with many code examples of fully working apps for free. Code snippets, animation, different type of views etc. can be easily downloaded and used in your own app.
Pro Large user community
Over the years it has built up a very active user community that is very involved in the evolution of B4X. In their forums you can find any answer to your questions, and if it is not there, they will answer you.
Pro RAD
VERY Rapid Application Development, with tons of pro features.
Pro Tightly integrated framework
Pro Almost everything is free and complete
Except the IDE for iOS. Even so it's very cheap.
Cons
Con No longer supported (deprecated since 2018)
Starting with version 4.x, Xamarin rebranded MonoDevelop as Xamarin Studio, but only for the Windows version of the IDE.
Stable release
7.6.9.22 / September 21, 2018
Con Bad formatting
MonoDevelop doesn't offer much in terms of autocompletion and code formatting. Most of the time the automatic formatting that MonoDevelop does is annoying and not really compliant with C# guidelines.
Con The MonoDevelop version that ships with Unity is several versions behind
The version of MonoDevelop that ships with Unity is several versions behind the main MonoDevelop branch. It also gets updated very rarely so any annoying bugs that it may have take a lot of time to get fixed.
Con Java-dependent Desktop Development
Con Only for Windows
The IDE, while very handy, only runs on Windows. If you want to code on Mac or Linux, you have to install it on a virtual machine. But you can debug your app by running it on the target OS.
Con The documentation and examples and tutorials are not up to date
The documentation and examples and tutorials are not up to date.
Con For BASIC language lovers
Lots of people are not fans of BASIC-like languages. Enjoyment of B4X, may depend on having a background or affinity for BASIC.
Con Can still need deep knowledge of Java
Attempts to provide BASIC-like language that is more comfortable for a certain demographic of users, but various circumstances will still require knowledge of Java. "No free lunch".
Con Lack of B4W real Web app
Erel needs to make a real Web app designer.
