should i use mono to develop linux app

Question

I have years of experience developing on microsoft development stack primarily visual studio 2012/c#. But right now, im required to develop app on linux. While i know c++, its been years since i really touch that. I have few questions.

1. Can i develop using mono and compile binary for linux and windows with no code(or minimal) code changes?
2. Can i develop on windows platform using visual studio 2012, compile for linux on window platform? do i need to use virtual machine for compiling for linux in windows platform?
3. How do you setup your development environment if you want to develop linux app on windows platform(develop on windows, compile for linux and windows. my linux box use for testing is a separate machine.)

Some info on what im working on. My project is about network channel analysis. The client is cheap industrial linux box most probably with no ui. Im using mono/c# to develop the client. The server would be windows develop using vs2012 c#. Most probably using wpf as ui. Im planning to share network/communication library between linux(client) and windows(server). My primary concern for using linux is for cost saving since the client is almost thousand units.

thank you.

Answer 1

Mono runs executables in PE (Portable Executable) format, the native file format of Windows. There's no need to "compile for Linux", as long as your app is pure MSIL. And even if you use native DLLs through p/invoke, Mono and Wine work together to run the Windows files on Linux.

(The a.out and ELF executable formats used by native Linux applications don't have mechanisms for storing .NET metadata, the PE format was modified to support .NET, so that's what .NET Framework (not Micro Framework) implementations use regardless of platform)

Answer 2

The most important things to consider at the beginning are,

• WinForms of Mono is problematic. Not only most third party controls won't work properly, but also libgdiplus itself is not 100% compatible with Microsoft's GDI+. It might appear to be a sweet option, but later you might still need to fight hard against the incompatibilities.
• WPF is not an option as Mono does not support it yet.
• GTK# is your best choice for UI, which blends naturally with Linux distros. If you refactor your Windows project properly, you should be able to share the non-UI code between your Windows and Linux solutions. This is what Mono guys recommend (not only use native UI frameworks for Windows, Linux, but also for Mac/MonoMac, iOS/Xamarin.iOS, and Android/Xamarin.Android).

So go back to your questions,

1. You should never wish for no code change for a real world project. No, that's impossible. As I said earlier, you have a chance to share most non-UI portion.
2. You can develop the non-UI portion and the Windows only portion using VS2012 and test them out on Windows. If you plan to use Mono's WinForms or GTK#, you must develop and debug on Linux using MonoDevelop. Thus, you need either a virtual machine or physical machine of Linux.
3. For me, I frequently switch between Linux/MonoDevelop and Windows/VS.

As Mono + C# is much more productive than using C/C++, many successful Linux apps are developed on Mono, such as Banshee and Tomboy.