Hi, I am trying to create an interactive command line program and it seems that Mono-Curses is what i need. but I am very confused on how to use it. I have a couple of questions. What do i really need to create my project? Do I need mono or can i use the .net framework? Why is there a .c file in there and what do I do with it?
If anyone could help me get setup with all the required assemblies it would be greatly appreciated.
I had a quick look at one of the source files (gui.cs) in Mono-Curses and it has
using Mono;
so you'll need Mono. Mono is available for Windows (if that is what you're developing under), however I do not know how it interacts with the official .NET framework. (ie: whether it acts as a complete replacement or if it can run side-by-side).
Upon first glance at the project and source code, it appears as if a rather substantial proportion of the code would have to be ported to Windows - I'm afraid it seems to have been designed specifically for Linux terminals (xterm) and possibly Mono-specific libraries. It's the former especially that really causes the problem here, since the API/interface differs hugely between the two OSs.
I would recommend you try and find a CLR (Windows) library for console-based applications rather than messing around with this one (though I'm not sure one exists, given the lesser importance of the command line on Windows compared to *nix). You'd probably even be better off writing one from scratch to be honest... If you want to go that route, try starting off with the C# port of the JConsole library, available for download here (and accompanied by a series of 6 tutorials). The low-level interfacing with the Win32 console is going to be the tricky bit, but that library should do almost all of it for you fortunately. Once you get beyond that stage, it probably won't be such a great task - you may even be able to reuse much of the Mono-Curses code (of which there doesn't seem to be a great deal). Good luck anyway!
does anyone know of a library that can do this with .net?
I don't mind using Mono as its just a personal project. I just need the steps to figure out what i need to download from mono to use the library.
I will be developing locally on my machine which is vista.