4 ms·

Serious question, I'll come back through my comment log to look at replies I promise: what tools exist for C# on Mono? I've used VS. I use Eclipse. I refuse to

Serious question, I'll come back through my comment log to look at replies I promise: what tools exist for C# on Mono? I've used VS. I use Eclipse. I refuse to leave an IDE. I've never liked debugging from the command line. Any help here would be appreciated since I really like C#'s sense of balance and embracing newer ideas from the functional side of the house. Thanks.

profquail 14y ago
You can use MonoDevelop to develop C# projects on Mono: http://monodevelop.com/ http://monodevelop.com/
- virmundi 14y ago
  I'll take a look at that now.
zanny 14y ago
Xamarin has a full application suite to complement it. I'd say since 2010 it has been perfectly mature. The C# runtime on Linux is slower than the Oracle JVM though, but about as fast as the OSS JVM from the statistics I last saw.
jbester 14y ago
Ximian has a plugin (http://mono-tools.com/ http://mono-tools.com/) that lets you remote deploy/debug mono applications from Visual studio - it was free after a survey not sure if it still is or if it will be updated to vs 2012. There are other tools sharpdevelop (for window) and monodevelop (all platforms) - but they are somewhat lacking. Sharp develop seems to slow down dramatically on large projects or WPF projects. Monodevelop seems to lag sharp develop in features and maturity. GUI toolkits for dotnet are hit-and-miss. GTK# has the most traction and is cross platform - the documentation was lacking last time I looked. But, if you have a GTK background it may be a non-issue. Wx and QT bindings exist but I believe development has slowed down/stalled. Of course, there are OS X, android and iOS bindings that ximian sells. Unless you have a large existing c# code base it probably doesn't make sense to use them for greenfield development. Server-side is where I think mono actually does shine a bit. Although you need to move out of the standard NetFX stack (i.e. WCF) to other open source libraries (i.e., ServiceStack). ASP.NET and MVC do run on mono - there are tutorials to deploy against apache or nginx. As you can imagine there is some lag between mono and microsoft dotnet framework (see http://www.mono-project.com/Compatibility http://www.mono-project.com/Compatibility). The gist of it mono tries and succeeds keeping up with the framework but there are large holes with respect to .NET 3.0 (WWF, WCF, WPF). There was a silverlight plugin (moonlight) but much like silverlight new development has stopped.
- jbester 14y ago
  I should add: the value proposition for mono is a bit bizarre. On the server, typically mono is chosen because mono on linux is much cheaper than azure, or windows hosting (AWS, etc) therefore you trading slightly more development and setup effort for cheaper run-time costs. For the phone/tablet market, you are doing the opposite trading money (monotouch licenses) to save development time and learning a new platform. On the desktop, I think the value proposition is much less well defined. It depends alot of the mix of clients you are supporting.
skrebbel 14y ago
There's no need to ditch Visual Studio at all. For instance, if you use VS with TestDriven.Net, you can run your tests on mono straight from VS. I believe there's also a way to debug mono from VS, but can't recall how and don't have VS available right here.
pcl 14y ago
Visual Studio + ReSharper is a dream come true. As someone who learns by doing rather than studying, ReSharper's refactorings and inline code reformatting suggestions was an invaluable source of idiomatic C# knowledge (second only to great code reviews from one of my C#-clueful coworkers). And Visual Studio's debugger lets you move the program counter backwards, which is just awesome for interactive REPL-esque development. (No, I'm not a JetBrains employee -- just an avid fan of every product of theirs that I've used.)

profquail 14y ago

You can use MonoDevelop to develop C# projects on Mono: http://monodevelop.com/ http://monodevelop.com/

virmundi 14y ago
I'll take a look at that now.

zanny 14y ago

Xamarin has a full application suite to complement it. I'd say since 2010 it has been perfectly mature. The C# runtime on Linux is slower than the Oracle JVM though, but about as fast as the OSS JVM from the statistics I last saw.

jbester 14y ago

Ximian has a plugin (http://mono-tools.com/ http://mono-tools.com/) that lets you remote deploy/debug mono applications from Visual studio - it was free after a survey not sure if it still is or if it will be updated to vs 2012. There are other tools sharpdevelop (for window) and monodevelop (all platforms) - but they are somewhat lacking. Sharp develop seems to slow down dramatically on large projects or WPF projects. Monodevelop seems to lag sharp develop in features and maturity. GUI toolkits for dotnet are hit-and-miss. GTK# has the most traction and is cross platform - the documentation was lacking last time I looked. But, if you have a GTK background it may be a non-issue. Wx and QT bindings exist but I believe development has slowed down/stalled. Of course, there are OS X, android and iOS bindings that ximian sells. Unless you have a large existing c# code base it probably doesn't make sense to use them for greenfield development. Server-side is where I think mono actually does shine a bit. Although you need to move out of the standard NetFX stack (i.e. WCF) to other open source libraries (i.e., ServiceStack). ASP.NET and MVC do run on mono - there are tutorials to deploy against apache or nginx. As you can imagine there is some lag between mono and microsoft dotnet framework (see http://www.mono-project.com/Compatibility http://www.mono-project.com/Compatibility). The gist of it mono tries and succeeds keeping up with the framework but there are large holes with respect to .NET 3.0 (WWF, WCF, WPF). There was a silverlight plugin (moonlight) but much like silverlight new development has stopped.

jbester 14y ago
I should add: the value proposition for mono is a bit bizarre. On the server, typically mono is chosen because mono on linux is much cheaper than azure, or windows hosting (AWS, etc) therefore you trading slightly more development and setup effort for cheaper run-time costs. For the phone/tablet market, you are doing the opposite trading money (monotouch licenses) to save development time and learning a new platform. On the desktop, I think the value proposition is much less well defined. It depends alot of the mix of clients you are supporting.

skrebbel 14y ago

There's no need to ditch Visual Studio at all. For instance, if you use VS with TestDriven.Net, you can run your tests on mono straight from VS. I believe there's also a way to debug mono from VS, but can't recall how and don't have VS available right here.

pcl 14y ago

Visual Studio + ReSharper is a dream come true. As someone who learns by doing rather than studying, ReSharper's refactorings and inline code reformatting suggestions was an invaluable source of idiomatic C# knowledge (second only to great code reviews from one of my C#-clueful coworkers). And Visual Studio's debugger lets you move the program counter backwards, which is just awesome for interactive REPL-esque development. (No, I'm not a JetBrains employee -- just an avid fan of every product of theirs that I've used.)