Porting ASP.NET application to Mono/Apache under Linux

Question

I've got a relatively small ASP.NET project that was written using C# 4.0.

I was wondering if anybody had managed to port such a project over to running under a webserver on Linux, the latest information I can find appears to only have support for ASP.Net 2.0 - Configuring and running Mono ASP.NET 3.5 (AJAX.NET) on Linux computers

The project uses LINQ-to-SQL for the entire data access layer, and I know Mono itself support LINQ, so I thought it stands to reason that it should work.

I just want to know if it's a complete waste of time or not before starting.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I run an ASP.NET 4.0 application on Suse Linux using mono. My experience with mono is that it just works. My app is ~ 15.000 LOC and uses third party components like mongo-csharp-driver, lucene.net, elmah, munq, and sphorium.webdavserver.

I've had almost no compatibility problems during development - and the ones I had where easily worked out (for example sphorium accesses the registry; this obviously works different on Linux/Mono). I've even started developing with Visual Studio instaed of MonoDevelop and without the Mono plugin, because Visual Studio is a better IDE, and it just works when I compile my web app on linux and deploy it on Apache (even though I develop with .NET on Windows).

I've written a short blogpost on getting started with the setup

Answer 2

This is definitely not a waste of time. The company I work for converted our VB.Net application to C# so that it can run under mono. This application has over 200k lines of code. We now are running with Ubuntu/Apache/Mono/Postgresql on Amazon ec2.

The only concern I would have is with your database. If it is MS SQL then you will need to look at migrating to MySQL or Postgresql. Again we did this with 300+ tables and 900 stored procedures. It is definately something worthwhile in the long run.

I think that the best way to get started would be to setup a local environment running something like Ubuntu. You can get the near latest versions of mono from the repositories at http://badgerports.org/ or if you prefer you can the latest versions as build scripts which are maintained here. Install monodevelop and build your code on linux with mono. From experience the mono with C# is a pretty much a complete implementation of the .net framework. I would be surprised if there was something in your application that is yet to be implemented in mono.

I have an answer here showing an easy configuration for your application under apache. I use this configuration for mono applications running on Ubuntu.