How to get started with Mono in Linux for a beginner?

Question

How do I start using Mono in Linux as a beginner when I want to switch from Visual Studio?

Is there some easy way to install it like Visual Studio and get started? So far,with what I've seen,it looks complex to even get started.

Installing and configuring Mono in linux is a lot of work right?

or Is there some distro which I can directly install and get started with applications in Linux?

Answer 1

I recently started to dabble in Mono myself and have so far realized that the MonoProject has made huge advancements in this area. It's well worth it to investigate.

With that said, the easiest method is to get setup with a Linux distro that is Mono friendly such as Suse, or Ubuntu. Personally, I tried it using Ubuntu 8.10.

Once you've got your Linux distro setup properly download and install MonoDevelop. This is an open source IDE that's tightly integrated to work with the Mono platform. MonoDevelop was taken as a branch of SharpDevelop and designed to work with the Mono compiler from the ground up.

This is by far the easiest and fastest way to get setup with Mono. The MonoDevelop IDE is very similar to that of Visual C# Express even. It comes complete with Project/Solution management, GUI development using the GTK# framework, an integrated debugger and a host of other features you would expect in an IDE such as code-completion, line numbers, code-folding etc.

The folks at the MonoProject are on to something with this suite of tools.

Hope this helps you get started.

Mono Project Homepage

Mono Develop Homepage

Answer 2

There are a few interesting books on Mono, although they're probably a little bit old. Still, probably it's worth to grab one and take a look in order to start up.

1. Practical Mono
2. Mono: A developer's notebook
3. Cross-Platform .NET development
4. Mono Kick-start

Then, I'd install latest Mono (2.4) on a Linux box (OpenSuse is the one they use, so it will always go smoothly for development, but we also use Ubuntu internally) and start playing around with the compiler, MonoDevelop (which is quite good since 2.0) and so on.

The only tough point will be writing GUI applications, although my team make extensively use of MWF on different Unix flavors. But everything else will go as you'd expect. I'm specially happy with how great remoting works, for instance.

If you're used to Linux then it will be much easier, otherwise I'd also recommend you getting used to it following some tutorial.

Remember tools such us NUnit and NAnt will be also available, so you can start writing your code on both Windows and Linux and testing and compiling on both platforms.