Is is possible to have a bootable development environment for Monodevelop, just from a bootable USB. I am planning to test developing in MonoDevelop from a USB bootable version of Linuxmint 14.1 (Cinnamon). I don't want to invest in a virtual machine yet on my Dev pc.
If you have a pretty decent configuration on your laptop or PC and your BIOS supports booting from a USB Pen drive, then yes, you can burn an ISO to your USB Pen drive and start working with it. You can open with all applications seamlessly. For example, you can browse the web with Firefox, pass commands such as "apt-get ..." in the terminal, etc. I recently did the same thing by burning a Linux Mint 14.1 ISO on my 16GB Pen Drive. My machine had the below configuration:
(~4GB-RAM + 2.6GHZ-DUAL-CORE-CPU + ~300GB-HDD)
To format the pen-drive, you can issue this command from a linux terminal:
dd if=/home/PATH_TO_ISO/LinuxMint.iso of=/dev/sda bs=1M
Replace the path next to "if=" with the path to your ISO image, and the one next to "of=" with the device path of your USB pendrive.
My advice is not to make the LiveOS persistent. USB Pendrive is good enough to boot a system and start it, but if the OS starts saving data on it, you will be hit by performance degrade. After all, USB2 has some speed limitations. Rather, I advice you to save your work (your monodevelop solutions, projects, etc.) on an existing NTFS/EXT4 partition on your machine itself. This way you will enjoy a good performance, while also being able to boot from your Pen drive.
Cheers.