Having just updated Mono to 2.6.3 (on OS X), I noticed in the installer that cocoa# 0.9.5 is also installed. However using MonoDevelop there are no cocoa# project templates by default, and I was wondering if anyone knew more about creating cocoa# apps.
If you goto the cocoa# page on the Mono site you can see it hasn't been updated since 2008, and cocoa-sharp.com has nothing on it at all now.
Has this project fallen by the wayside? If so, does anyone know of any alternatives? Winforms apps running under X11 are butt ugly and GTK# isn't much better.
To have a solid bridge between Mono and Cocoa would be ideal for developing OS X desktop apps, in the same way as the MonoTouch does with Cocoa Touch for the iPhone.
Any thoughts?
Cocoa# doesnt seem to be maintained anymore, but take a look at MonObjc.
Also interesting: Heads-up: new Mono bindings for OSX.
Related
I have a standard WinForms project I wrote in Visual Studio C# that I would like to be able to run on my Apple (non-mobile) devices.
After some light research, I saw that a program called Mono supposedly offers this capability, but after playing with it for a while, I can't seem to get it to work and the instructions offered for it are quite awful.
Is there another option for porting a WinForms project to run on Mac OS, or a good, detailed set of instructions for Mono available elsewhere than mono-project.com?
I was told that VisusalStudio has no version for Mac. So what should I use if I want to develop in C# on Mac ? Anybody has experiences with this ? I'm looking for native IDE, I don't want to run VS using VirtualBox or any virtualization solution.
And if I create application with WPF GUI will it run on Mac ? Or is WPF only for Windows GUI developing ?
MonoDevelop is a free open source IDE based on the Mono project. There's builds available for Linux, MacOS X and Windows.
For GUI development, you'll need to use the GTK+ framework included with Mono - there's no plans to implement WPF on any platform other than Windows. GTK+ is cross-platform, though, so you can compile the same app for MacOS, Windows and Linux if you need to.
EDIT: It appears MonoDevelop also supports WinForms - http://www.mono-project.com/WinForms
There are a couple of alternative IDEs but nothing comparable to MonoDevelop in terms of features - but you can always just write C# code in your favourite editor and compile it using the Mono build tools, of course.
WPF can run on any environment that supports it in its runtime environment. Currently that is only Windows since the Mono project has no plans to implement WPF
Check out the Mono Project.
For an IDE check out MonoDevelop.
You can also check out the MonoTouch to develop to the IPhone.
As already mentioned WPF isn't supported but they do mention an alternative:
Silverlight implement a subset of the
WPF APIs and is available on Windows,
MacOS X and through our own open
source effort Moonlight it is
available on Linux and other Unix
systems.
As far as I know there is no complete IDE that support C# with intelli sense, etc.
So Vmware Fusion + Windows including Studio in Unity mode will be it :)
Simple C# syntax highlighting you can get with textmate.
I have a c#-program, that works well under Mono and on OSX, I also was able to create an app-directory for that program. Now I want to distribute it, but I don't want to force the user to install mono, since this is unusual under Mac (and has some side-effects, that I want to avoid).
I already tried to build a bundle with mkbundle, but mkbundle doesn't work correctly under Mac.
I should add, that I use GTK.
What is the easiest way to build a compleley independent app under Mac? Is there any good tutorial? Is there a good tool, that could help?
Ask Miguel (December 9 2010 blog post)
MonoMac: we just released MonoMac 0.4 and we are now adding support for creating self-contained application bundles that developers can redistribute themselves or even submit to the Apple AppStore for MacOS.
MonoMac has been a lot of work, mostly, due to popular contributions. There is a nice emerging community of new contributors to Mono that has sparked in the last few weeks.
Did you try macpack?
http://www.mono-project.com/Guide:Running_Mono_Applications
It should be possible to use mkbundle in the linking of mono assemblies to produce a "portable app" with no requirement on installing the runtime.
http://www.mono-project.com/Linker
Could you introduce me a development environment you recommend for C# on Mac?
You want Mono for OS X. Download page. And for an IDE, MonoDevelop.
I migrated some months ago from windows to mac.. it's been a long while since the last time i logged into windows, and I was a C# freak.. so back on mac i tried using Mono, and.. i was really dissapointed because it's not like in Windows: you have a weak IDE to work with and it seems so.. poor! Then i decided to make the big step and switch to objective-c and Cocoa! And now i'm happy again as i was on windows. So, my point here is if you wanna keep going with C#, stick to the windows platform.. but if you want to develop mac apps, try moving to objective-c and Cocoa!
You can also try WINE thats sort of emulator for windows programs on Mac/Linux and you can try installing .net and SharpDevelop tools, and use mono to create output, the benefit is you will get little rich tools to do your development.
TextWrangler + Mono
Parallels + UltraEdit + command-line compilation
Parallels + Visual Studio
I'm downloading MonoDevelop now, haven't tried it in awhile.
I use VMWare Fusion to run Visual Studio in a Windows virtual machine. I'd only recommend this if you've got a fast Intel processor with at least 4GB of ram.
Fusion also offers a "Unity" mode so that Visual Studio would look like it's being run as a native Mac application. A great concept, but in practice it uses way too much RAM and processor.
Otherwise you could use boot camp to run Visual Studio in Windows. This gives you the full strength of your hardware resources but you have to boot to use it.
How do I start using Mono in Linux as a beginner when I want to switch from Visual Studio?
Is there some easy way to install it like Visual Studio and get started?
So far,with what I've seen,it looks complex to even get started.
Installing and configuring Mono in linux is a lot of work right?
or Is there some distro which I can directly install and get started with applications in Linux?
I recently started to dabble in Mono myself and have so far realized that the MonoProject has made huge advancements in this area. It's well worth it to investigate.
With that said, the easiest method is to get setup with a Linux distro that is Mono friendly such as Suse, or Ubuntu. Personally, I tried it using Ubuntu 8.10.
Once you've got your Linux distro setup properly download and install MonoDevelop. This is an open source IDE that's tightly integrated to work with the Mono platform. MonoDevelop was taken as a branch of SharpDevelop and designed to work with the Mono compiler from the ground up.
This is by far the easiest and fastest way to get setup with Mono. The MonoDevelop IDE is very similar to that of Visual C# Express even. It comes complete with Project/Solution management, GUI development using the GTK# framework, an integrated debugger and a host of other features you would expect in an IDE such as code-completion, line numbers, code-folding etc.
The folks at the MonoProject are on to something with this suite of tools.
Hope this helps you get started.
Mono Project Homepage
Mono Develop Homepage
There are a few interesting books on Mono, although they're probably a little bit old. Still, probably it's worth to grab one and take a look in order to start up.
Practical Mono
Mono: A developer's notebook
Cross-Platform .NET development
Mono Kick-start
Then, I'd install latest Mono (2.4) on a Linux box (OpenSuse is the one they use, so it will always go smoothly for development, but we also use Ubuntu internally) and start playing around with the compiler, MonoDevelop (which is quite good since 2.0) and so on.
The only tough point will be writing GUI applications, although my team make extensively use of MWF on different Unix flavors. But everything else will go as you'd expect. I'm specially happy with how great remoting works, for instance.
If you're used to Linux then it will be much easier, otherwise I'd also recommend you getting used to it following some tutorial.
Remember tools such us NUnit and NAnt will be also available, so you can start writing your code on both Windows and Linux and testing and compiling on both platforms.
With the just released Ubuntu 9.04 a very current Mono development environment is as close as:
apt-get install monodevelop
I used to agree with you that it was somewhat difficult to get going with Mono, but the latest version of Ubuntu has melted that barrier away. And the latest version of Monodevelop is an absolute joy to use.
Don't use Ubuntu? Then I would go with Peter's advice of using a VMWare image.
For a very easy start with mono under linux u can download
a vmware image
a linux live distro
with everything included to start.
If you are accustomed to using visual-studio, you can still develop in Visual Studio, and copy your binaries to Linux/OSX or whatever. Or even better, if you have a shared drive, just reconfigure your VS-Project output directory to the shared location.
There might be advantages to using the mono compiler, or monodevelop, but since you are getting started, the above is really the easiest thing to do. If you want to run on Linux, the mono installer is an excellent option for getting up and running in a hurry. Unfortunately, there's no installer available for the newest mono release, so you'll either need admin permission, or need to compile from source.
http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/archive/1.9.1/linux-installer/2/mono-1.9.1_2-installer.bin
For installing newest Mono 3.2.5+ with MonoDevelop 4.2.1+ it is better is use tpokorra repository.
The simplest way I could find is to download the OpenSUSE VMWare Image on their site and just run it. You get all the tools you need :) Preconfigured.
Debian and Ubuntu, and probably all other children, have mono in the repository. So, setting up mono in Linux can be as easy as
aptitude install monodevelop
However I would suggest version 2 which requires using the 'sid' repository in Debian (don't know about Ubuntu).
vim /etc/apt/sources.list [ :%s/squeeze/sid/g ]