Learn C# on mac?

Question

Is mono the only route , any specific visual studio like editors that you recommend?

Answer 1

Without meaning to state the obvious and miss the point, if you mean a Mac computer rather than a Mac OS, you could install bootcamp or use parallels to run windows on the Mac and then use Visual Studio (there are also free versions of Visual Studio)

Answer 2

Yeah, mono is really your only option, unless some undergrad somewhere has developed some very experimental thing I don't know about. As for an IDE, well I believe the only thing half way stable that will work right now on Mac OS X is Monodevelop:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Feb-07-2.html

I mean, you could run Parallels and develop your code on a Windows VM with Visual Studio and as long as you follow certain guidelines about portability, you could use VS to develop your mono apps. Although, you probably might as well get familiar with Monodevelop. It would be interesting to see if SharpDevelop ever gets ported.

Answer 3

Well, you could also try Silverlight...

Pro:

• It is an official Microsoft implementation, so it is more likely to work
• Its support for recent stuff like C# 3.0 is much better

Con:

• It is browser-only, Silverlight apps do not run standalone
• You won't get the whole .NET Class Library, only a subset, so it is somewhat limited
• You won't get Visual Studio on a Mac

For IDE, I suggest Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight (apparently it is Windows-only at the moment) you should use MonoDevelop or SharpDevelop or something like that.