Using .NET (Dot Net) With Mono

Welcome to TheCredence.com - You may like to subscribe to our RSS feed to stay updated.

.NET has been of Microsoft's flagships ever since its introduction a few years ago. Therefore, it should come as no surprise to know that several attempts at porting .Net tools to other platforms exist. Some efforts, like the GNU .NET have only had limited success. Others, however, had more – and Mono is one of them.

Mono is, in fact, several things. It is not only an implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure, but an entire array of software aiming to bring .NET services to Linux. Under its umbrella, Mono hosts IDEs like MonoDevelop, libraries like Gtk# and the associated documentation efforts.

Generally, there are two use cases for Mono: writing an application with Mono from scratch, and porting an existing .NET application.

Writing A .NET Application From Scratch

Writing an application from scratch is not very uncommon with Mono. Several large-scale projects, such as Beagle have been developed using Mono and C#. Mono is already mature enough to write full-sized applications and to provide the runtime required for them.

The most common language is C#, but bindings for other languages do exist, including Boo, Ada and Python. The actual process of conceiving the program is not hindered in any way by the use of Mono. However, since some Mono-related projects are still lacking in terms of documentation, choosing the right path and actually implementing the application may not be straightforward at times.

Porting a .NET Application

Mono was developed with porting in mind, so it provides several tools and libraries designed especially for this. Of particular use is MonoDevelop's ability to analyze an application's source code, and give a detailed report about what support functions are not yet implemented or supported in Mono.

Since the CLI is essentially platform-independent, a simple recompilation is often enough, if no support functions are found to be missing. Mono's implementation is quite complete – the core part of the system and most helping libraries are already available. A notable exception is the Windows.Forms API, which is only partially implemented and thus often giving headaches.
However, several alternatives do exist, and if Windows.Forms proves to be impossible to work with, the application can easily be adapted to working with Gtk# for instance.

Mono's development is extremely rapid. The Mono Project is backed by Novell, and during its development, the Mono team has received much insight from Microsoft. A recent breakthrough is the assistance Microsoft is giving in porting Silverlight. Therefore, it's safe to say that Mono will become a very powerful cross-platform environment, if it is not one already.

Popularity: 3% [?]