Guidelines to write C# applications for .NET and mono

Question

Mono claims to be compatible with .NET.

Have you tried it?

Can you share any tips or guidelines for making a running .NET application compatible with mono?

Answer 1

Might be MoMA helps you

Answer 2

Basically, unit test like crazy! I support both mono and C# on a pet project (protobuf-net), and getting it to even compile on the range of different platforms was fun (I support mono, CF, Silverlight, etc). There are a number of compiler bugs in mono (even in the current release), in particular relating to generics - which mean you might need to use slightly different code to get it to compile in all flavors.

Then you need to think about which framework features you need. Avoid anything like WPF/WCF/WF, for example. But if you stick to core 2.0 features you are generally OK. There are still a lot of places where mono throws NotImplementedException, though. In one recent case, there were two ways of doing something: the "old" way worked on mono but was [Obsolete] in MS; the "new" version worked on MS, but was NotImplementedException on mono. Fun!

Answer 3

See these documents for in-depth answers:

• General document about Application Portability
• Porting Winforms Applications
• Porting ASP.NET Applications

Answer 4

Two things to keep in mind:

• Don't try anything fancy.

• Don't expect it to work under Mono first try

Mono is really good at the things that you do every day, like manipulating strings and displaying web pages. It's really bad at things that need to use the little hidden corners of the .NET runtime library. Crypto, for instance is still implemented at 1.1, and even some of that doesn't actually work.

In short, Mono is not a silver bullet.