Mono sounds Sharp
by Pascal Opitz on April 10 2006, 06:58
If platform specifications change sometimes one has to make the descision if the app needs to be ported or if there is another way. My research about porting .Net applications reveals a surprisingly great range of Open Source tools.
This starts with the IDE I am using for coding my C# application, the really well done SharpDevelop that after a while I find very easy to use.
But for all the .Net newbies: Compiling a binary DLL in .Net doesn’t mean that it’s a windows dead end automatically. Especially for non-GUI applications (i.e. CLI or Web applications) it might work to just execute the DLL with mono, mod_mono or XSP.
At least it won’t be a big effort to port applications for mono most of the times, and since mono is so close to .Net there obviously is a mono port of SharpDevelop: MonoDevelop, which should run on most UNIX/Linux platforms (and MacOSX, even though I didn’t get my head around installing it properly), once all dependencies are installed.
This road is not a one way track, either:
For all those people who want to improve the performance of PHP scripts and don’t worry about using .Net or mono, the Phalanger Compiler might be the way to go.
