.NET on a Mac

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I had the need to write some code on my Mac (actually I was too lazy to open up the Win7 laptop) and being that I did not want to torture myself by writing it in Xcode, I decided to try the Mono project and write the code in C# instead. I haven't looked at Mono in a while now so I was pleasantly surprised with the ease at which the packages (Mono framework and MonoDevelop IDE) installed on the Mac and then the equal ease with which I quickly copied some code from the web and wrote my little program. It literally took 30 minutes to do the whole thing. Here is a snapshot of the MonoDevelop IDE which has full support for intellisense, compiling etc. The only thing I did not see was a debugger, but I'm sure it's in there somewhere. 

The support for .NET seems pretty deep, my code referenced some pretty advanced assemblies and it all worked perfectly. I've only tried console apps and they pretty much cover all aspects of the framework from Xml, Networking, web services etc. WinForms and WebForms support is supposed to be very good too although I haven't tried them yet. If you have a Mac or Linux box, then please check out Mono. 

 

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 28, 2009
    PingBack from http://microsoft-sharepoint.simplynetdev.com/net-on-a-mac/

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2009
    This is great. I am not a coder but have been looking for some custom solutions for software that can only be run on PC. Would this allow PC programs to be ported over to mac? Alex

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2009
    Most .NET 2.0 programs (written in C#) should be portable to Mono (and thereby to any platform that runs Mono). There are a few limitations but you can probably get around them. Please see the Mono site for more details. - Sujit