I have a DLL written in C# which is acessed by a native EXE (written in Delphi) via COM. Now I was asked to make it work with Mono (on Windows, not Linux) instead of Microsoft .NET Framework.
Is it possible to be done? If it is, how can I do it?
Possibly, yes.
Mono has had COM-callable wrappers for a while. Check: http://www.mono-project.com/COM_Interop.
Probably the easiest thing to do is to download SharpDevelop and try to compile your existing code for Mono.
Related
I am trying to use this code in a Unity project, but it seems the implementations of COM Interop in Mono/.NET differs, which causes the code to fail or crash. Running the code in .NET works fine, but running it with Mono 2.0 (outside of Unity) fails in the same way as in Unity, suggesting it is a problem with Mono in general and not Unity.
If I compile and run the code as-is, it fails because the type cast from MMDeviceEnumerator to IIMMDeviceEnumerator fails. When decorating all interfaces with [ComInterop], the cast succeeds, but the call to GetDefaultAudioEndpoint crashes Unity/Mono with an Access Violation.
It is hard to find good documentation of COM Interop on Mono in general - and particularly so regarding such an old version. Is it at all possible to get this running?
Wrap the COM functions in C funtions and call the C functions via P/Invoke instead. This can be done in two steps:
Create a VC++ project that wraps the functions you needed in wasapi. Expose them via a module define file or __declspec(dllexport). Build the code into a dll that exposes the functions you need.
In your Unity3D project, access them via P/Invoke.
Here is an example. In your case, just use the COM code in the C/C++ part to do what you want.
Mono 1.0 and Mono 1.1.xx do not have support for COM.
Stop trying with Mono, Mono is for platform independence and COM Interop is Microsoft only. Use open source SDKs for Video Playing or better invoke apps from command line like vlc to play, encode etc.
for strict constrains in my scenarios, I have very few room to install my application, and .net framework is not installable (any version).
If the application is really simple (more or less), it is possible to create an application in visual studio (in c#) with no dependendency from the .net framework?
Thanks!
Short answer: NO.
There is no way to create a .NET application without any framework.
It is possible to compile a C# app such that it has no dependencies on any of the built-in .NET types & libraries, by using the /nostdlib switch (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fa13yay7.aspx). You then need to supply your own System namespace.
However, this doesn't remove the need for the .NET framework on the target machine if you use the standard C# compiler. As well as containing the built-in types, the framework also includes the JIT IL compiler, the CLR extra, which all .NET executables and dll's are reliant on.
There are ways of compiling C# code such that it doesn't need the framework though. The Xamarin product for example (http://xamarin.com/), supports compiling C# code to native iOS apps, which are wholely independent of the .NET framework. I'm not aware of any equivalent for "desktop" OS's though.
Writing, compiling and running a C# program without .Net means running a special C# compiler that produces native code instead of managed code. I think such a compiler exists from WinRT for mobile phones, which uses COM instead of .Net (And C++/CX instead of C++/CLI). Code it produces does not depend on the .Net Framework, but does depend on the WinRT runtime.
You may create mono GTK# application and then use mkbundle to generate independent executable. You can use Visual Studio to build your logic and use Xamarin studio to build GTK# GUI. For more information about mkbundle see this and this.
To reply to your query. It really is not possible to create a .Net application without the .Net frame work. And moreover if you have installed Visual Studio by default it would have asked you to install .Net framework or would have installed it by default. In that scenario there is already .Net framework installed in your PC.
Thanks
I've got a .NET app and some related third party DLLs, that I would like to run on an Android phone. The .NET app is written in C# and the DLLs are fully mananged, although they contain some unsafe code and work with DirectX using managed C++. Is it possible to retarget the application to Mono, and run it on the Android OS, considering that I only have a part of the application source code?
This is either impossible or very close to an Heracles's task.
Consider porting the existing code to Android and re-writing the missing bits.
The unsafe may be bit-twidlling in an OS specific way. I would use reflector to dump out the code and investigate what's it's doing and then see what mono makes of it.
Since it's using DirectX I'd suspect you're probably going to end up down a dead end.
I've looked at the Mono Libraries and Axiom 3D might be a useful abstraction to use if you need to re-engineer the Direct X calls.
Can someone help/guide me with using SQLite lib on Linux (MONO) and Windows (.NET)
On linux i use native mono sqlite client, and on windows i use http://sqlite.phxsoftware.com/
is there a way to define 'using' directives like this :
#if (linux)
using Mono.Data.Sqlite;
#else
using System.Data.SQLite;
Another problem is small differencies on both implementations, like :
cmd = new SqliteCommand(); // mono
cmd = new SQLiteCommand(); // sqlite.phxsoftware.com
Waiting for any help
If you know better or simplier way to do this it'll very thankfull for info.
Thanks
You can use csharp-sqlite which is a port to C# of Sql-Lite. It is very active and based on 3.6.22 version of SqlLite. See Miguel's comments on attempts to try to speed it up.
I've recently come across the issue too: building an application that uses Sqlite on Windows with Visual Studio and deploying it on an Ubuntu Server box for production.
The simplest solution I've found is using the Mono driver for Sqlite: Mono.Data.Sqlite.
Things could have been a little simpler but there is a bug with .Net 4.0 that is not yet packaged in the official Mono releases.
So you'll have to compile Mono from source (the general instructions are here):
first compile the whole Mono stuff
you do not need to install it if you want to keep your current Mono setup
copy the Mono.Data.Sqlite.dll library
Of course you can "cross-compile": I've built Mono on Ubuntu Server and used the dll in a Windows .Net project.
Then ensure you have the native Sqlite library (sqlite3.dll for Windows and sqlite3.so for Linux) in your library path: for Windows I simply copied the sqlite3.dll next to the Mono.Data.Sqlite.dll assembly, for Linux it should work out of the box.
You project should then work seamlessly in both Windows/.Net and Linux/Mono environments.
You can solve the naming differences using alias
#if (linux)
using SqlCommand = Mono.Data.Sqlite.SqliteCommand;
#else
using SqlCommand = System.Data.SQLite;
Using different assemblies for different builds is a more complex task i think.. you can have a look at the MSBuild documentation
There is a fully managed SQLite translation. If you use that, then you could use the same DLL on Mono and Windows.
Another way to solve your issue is to create your own database-interface and then implement that interface once for Mono and one for Microsoft .NET in separate DLLs. (Basically the same way you create code that runs against different databases)
You can just use the mono implementation of SQLite for both, Windows and Linux versions of your software. Just include the mono assembly for SQLite in your software package and refer to it locally.
As you can read here in the last post, you can use the managed way of mono solely in your code and need just to redistribute the native part for windows differently. But you do not have to mess with to managed implementations and redundand code through that.
The open-source Vici CoolStorage ORM library works on Windows (.NET), Mono (Mac,Linux and Windows) and MonoTouch (iPhone) using that platform's SQLite driver.
To use it on these different platforms, you don't have to change anything to your source code. Just recompile, and it should work.
IMO you should first try to find an implementation that works in both Windows and Linux. If that doesn't work, create an assembly that defines a common interface for SQLite and put all you "#if LINUX" code in that assembly. Then use that assembly in the main application to avoid cluttering the main app with all the # defines.
The SQLite ADO.NET provider is actually a mixed-mode assembly, which contains the native SQLite library. This native library is not the same on Windows and Linux of course, so this provider doesn't work on Linux. However, there is a managed-only version of the provider (SQLite-1.0.65.0-managedonly-binaries.zip on the download page). So I think you just need to use this version of the provider, and provide the adequate native SQLite dynamic library along with it (.dll on Windows, .so on Linux)
Some answers suggest the fully-managed C# port of SQLite3. But, unfortunately, no release to date supports Linux or Mac OS X despite being compilable with the Mono C# compiler.
A future release will correctly run on those non-Windows platforms with the Mono runtime. WIth some caveats, the source repository contains code that works.
Having said that, the System.Data.SQLite implementation available from sqlite.org works with both .Net and Mono, on Windows and non-Windows platforms. You just need to ensure that the app.config used by Mono at runtime maps the (C++) SQLite3 dll to the appropriate .so or .dylib library. If you choose the "mixed-mode" version, then it should just work and you don't need to worry about separate dlls.
There's a program written entirely in C# that targets .NET Framework 2.0.
Is there a way I could somehow compile (translate) managed EXE to a native one so it could be .NET-agnostic? I know there are probably commercial products for that purpose... but they are a bit expensive.
The problem is that we are to deploy the program on computers running Windows XP with no .NET Framework installed. There's also a requirement that the program's size must not exceed 500Kb (1Mb maximum) for it is downloaded from the web server (now the size is 255Kb). That is why there's no way we could attach a full-fledged .NET FX (or even a reduced one) to the downloaded program's file.
Obviously it is a terrible software engineering error that should have been detected and avoided earlier so we could use native technologies like C++ instead.
We have tried for now Novell's Mono - an open-source implementation of .NET Framework for Linux, MAC and Windows. Mono consists of C# Compiler, IDE, runtime (CLR) and Class Library assemblies (like System.dll and mscorlib.dll - much like .NET's class library assemblies installed to GAC).
What we tried to do is to locate CLR files and ship those along with our program's file and a few assemblies. This way the program can be invoked by running "mono program.exe" (command prompt) on a user's computer.
In addition to the inconvenience of such a use for the end user CLR files (mono.exe and mono.dll) turned out to be about 2.5 Mb in total that is much greater than the desired 500 Kb or even 1 Mb.
So, we have left with no other option but to translate our .NET App to a native one by a compiler, however the question remains - what compiler should we use and where could we find one...
For now I have stumbled upon a Singularity OS Project by Microsoft Research. It is an open-source research OS that is written in managed code (in part at least). The Singularity OS includes a Bartok compiler that the OS uses in order to translate a managed program to a native one (x86 32 bit). It should be noted that Bartok can't translate all the aspects of .NET 2.0 to a native code, but most of them. However I haven't yet learnt how to use the Singularity...
I would be really grateful to you if you could provide me with some useful tips and advice regarding the problem, your own experience with Singularity OS and Bartok Compiler or another approaches to the problem that I have overlooked and ways of solving it.
Thank you very much in advance!
Finally, using Mono's Full AOT feature (on Callum Rogers' advice) I've managed to produce a program.exe.dll that lacks a CLI header.
So it looks to me like a native dll. However I can't figure out how to convert that dll into exe or make it operational.
Also this dll doesn't seem to expose any functions of interest such as main function.
Check out AOT (Ahead Of Time) Compilation from the Mono project. This compiles your managed project into a native exe or an elf executable (depending on which system you target) that does not need the JIT. This is the technique used to get mono apps onto the iPhone (where the JIT/Framework are not allowed) and also has the added benefits of faster startup times, lower memory usage and it makes it harder for people to decompile your code. You said you were already using Mono, so it should be compatible.
Read up about it at the mono-project.com website and at Miguel de Icaza's blog (and iPhone info).
Note that you cannot use dynamic code or generic interfaces like
interface IFoo<T> {
...
void SomeMethod ();
}
And you will have to compile the DLLs of all the libraries you use.
PS: Make sure to use "Full" AOT for your problem.
2018 Update
At Build 2018, Microsoft announced .Net Core 3.0 roadmap that support Windows desktop applications (Winform & WPF)
2017 Update
For console apps, you can use .net core Self-contained deployments (SCD). Even for a hello world app, your package will 50MB+. You still need to install VC runtime though.
Update
As #jenix's comment, .NET Native is only for Windows Store Apps(UWP). After 3 years of it's announcement, this is still true, .net native for desktop may be dropped by microsoft . So this answer is not applicable anymore.
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Microsoft Announced .NET Native Preview on Build 2014
With the .NET Native Developer Preview, apps will get deployed on end-user devices as fully self-contained natively compiled code, and will not have a dependency on the .NET Framework on the target device/machine. So, no .NET framework required on the target machine with .NET Native.
Announcing .NET Native Preview
Microsoft .NET Native
There is a project called CrossNet that parses .Net Assemblies and generates unmanaged C++ code, that can be compiled in any standard compiler.
Not really a solution for .NET to native conversion, but maybe this helps: http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/faq/#framework.required
Not quite sure that there is much you can do besides painstakingly rewrite the application. To ease the already burdening process, you could disassemble the .NET application using something like Reflector (into Microsoft C++), and use that as a base to start and just replace managed C++ references with native ones.