Creating .NET C# Applications for Linux

An anonymous reader wrote to mention an article on the IBM site entitled Mono brings .Net Apps to Linux. From the article: "Mono gives open source developers the programming power and flexibility to build applications for Linux while maintaining cross-platform capabilities, using a variety of .NET-compatible languages. One of the great advantages of Mono for current .NET developers is providing an easier migration path to Linux. The Mono project has a very open and active development community and provides both developer tools and the infrastructure needed to run .NET client and server applications. Perhaps the most important benefit of using the Mono architecture is that you gain language independence. Mono lets you leverage any existing code from languages supported in the .NET runtime. "

Comments

portability problems

[vlad_petric]

The article is silent on the GUI part. Unfortunately, that's also the most unportable part with .NET. Since winforms was really tailored for the windows api, porting it is no trivial tasks. Windows.Forms/Mono is still under heavy development.

Keep in mind that Microsoft saw .NET as cross-platform, but only between windows platforms. Java is far better in that respect. While full compatibility is in many cases impossible, the extra effort per platform is much smaller

GUI applications

[DynamiteNeon]

Don't get me wrong, I happen to like both C# and Java, but if I have to create a gui app on windows for some reason, C# and .net wins hands down.

Yes, I realize I could use SWT, but that's still not necessarily good enough. It surprises me that Swing still sucks so much after all this time. I would love to use one language exclusively if I could, but until I see some decent gui apps being built using Swing, it's hard for me to want to use Java unless I have backend services to create.

Having said that, I would like to know if anyone can point me to gui applications that use swing and are actually good and fast. I'm curious if they exist at all.

Re:let me get this straight ...

[TummyX]

.NET makes it simple to interface with existing libraries written in C which, IMHO, makes it a more natural fit with Linux. C# applications can easily take advantage of existing libraries (GTK etc) whilst Java requires more effort (to force you to be "pure" and cross platform).

Sometimes having ease and flexibility is more important than being cross platform.

Besides, most libraries linux C# applications p/invoke are source-portable so the C# application itself will be cross platform as long as you have the platform specific binaries for the native libraries you pinvoked. The binaries you distribute won't necessarily be cross platform but for desktop applications, that's not really a big issue.

Re:Here we go again

[miguel]

There are a number of cross-platform commercial applications that run on Mono, for example:

* Novell's own iFolder client and servers (same code base, modulo UI which is native on each of the three platforms: Linux/Gtk, Windows/Winforms, Cocoa/OSX).

* (http:///www.medsphere.com) Medsphere's products (Mono/Gtk# based).

* Otee's Unity game engine (http://www.otee.dk/index.html).

You can look for the "Works with Mono" logo on open source .NET applications and various commercial applications.

For a larger but still incomplete list, see:
http://www.mono-project.com/Software

As for your question about what will happen when C# 2.0 comes out, we have good news, we already have implemented it (we are missing two fairly minimal features though), for details you can see our web page on the subject:

http://www.mono-project.com/CSharp_Compiler

Generics, itereators, anonymous methods, nullable types, partial classes, per-accessor modifiers, static classes, fixed buffers and co/contra-variant delegates are all implemented and available today.

And we can not wait to implement the new features in C# 3.0

Miguel.