MonoDevelop is an IDE designed specifically for Gnome developers targeting the Mono runtime. Originally started as a port of the SharpDevelope IDE, it has grown into a significant project in its own right.
The goals for the MonoDevelop project are plainly stated as:
To create a best of breed development environment for Unix systems for Mono.
Since its written in Gtk#, and we like Gtk# and we get good support from Gtk#, most likely it will add functionality to improve the Gtk# experience.
We want to integrate the tools we have been building so far, so things like MonoDoc, NUnit-Gtk and the debugger should target MonoDevelop.
The current version, 0.14, suggests that it is still early in the development cycle. But despite that, there are already some key features that developers expect from a professional offering.
Top of the list for large teams is Subversion support. Thanks to the efforts of Jeff Stedfast and Lluis Sanchez, it now supports authentication and the more recent versions of Subversion found in Debian or Ubuntu.
Refactoring is also supported, though it is currently very rudimentary. New features in this build are renaming, interface stubbing, and encapsulation.
For those on teams who also use Visual Studio, it supports importing and exporting VS 2005 project files. This probably won't see much use, as MonoDevelop really is tuned for Linux projects targeting Gnome.
In terms of development options, it favors Linux conventions like tarballs over Microsoft MSI packages. It also has Linux desktop integration features such as the creation of launch scripts, .desktop file, and .pc files.