Developing with C# on OSX and Mono

Question

I\'m about to start a project that requires me to write c# code. The thing is, I\'ve got a mac.

I was wondering if there are any pitfalls involved in c# development usin

Answer 1

I would highly recommend using windows thru vmware rather than trying to code with some unstable osx programs. It's not cool to code for hours on a mac and then realize that none of your code works on any windows machine or that the gui looks totally different than on your computer.Always choose the right tools and languages for the right problem. Besides, visual studio is pretty nice to work with most of the time.

Answer 2

Be aware that the .NET libraries from Microsoft and the implementations in Mono are compatible "most of the time." If you're working in a team, you may run into some headache related to these compatibility issues (also, if you're using any third party plugins to any .NET application you're writing, you may have issues as well.). If you didn't want to run a virtual machine, I'd just bootcamp into Windows. It might disrupt your flow if you're very used to the OSX UI, but if the rest of your team is using Windows, I'd do that just to avoid compatibility issues.

Answer 3

The biggest thing I've had developing on Mono (admittedly on Linux) was GUIs. The majority of GUI-less code will run just fine. The only thing I've had to do is catch a few different exceptions. GUIs, however, would be a whole different beast, so don't expect those to translate well at all.

Answer 4

Based on your comment to HiVoltRock's answer (ASP.NET development), I'd say Mono 2.10.1 and MonoDevelop will be just fine (the stable release of MonoDevelop works just fine, but for development on OS X I prefer to use the most recent version which I compile from Git).

There are some things to take into account, such as file paths (ie: if the windows devs are writing static paths such as ApplicationsInstallDirectory + "\data\templates\foo.bar"; you will run into problems as directory separators on Mac OS are forward slashes. Also if existing code is using P/Invoke or other specific Window's functionality you'll be in trouble.

Finally if your code base uses third party libraries that requires Windows this could cause you issues.

For reference our product has been designed since day one with a requirement that it runs on Mono on Linux or OS X. With that in mind we've made sure to consider everything with cross-platform execution in mind. If you're joining an existing product, the same considerations might not have been given, meaning a lot of the existing code isn't compatible with Mono.

The Mono Migration Analyser will help determine if you've got any incompatible code.

There is a bit of fud out there about developing under Mono. Our project is an MVC3 with Razor, running .NET 4 using NHibernate, StructureMap etc and there haven't been that many issues developing on a non-Windows machine.

Answer 5

I've come across odd cases of memory leaks and segfaults with code compiled on Windows and dropped onto a Mono Linbox as-is. I've also had issues compiling .csproj files with xbuild that had some MS quirk that xbuild wasn't familiar with.

If I'm not mistaken, the two compilers do slightly different things at times, which are related to subtle implementation differences in the runtimes. This is most likely the cause of the segfaults and memory leaks I've come across.

My bottom line is, compile on the same platform as the runtime. So for local testing, you should be fine (you compile on mono on your mac and run/test with mono on your mac). But don't build the project on your mac and then release the resulting Mono binaries to Windows servers running MS .NET runtime (or vice versa). If you have a build server best would be to stick to that (which we all should do anyway... right?).

If your team doesn't have a build process and you must build the binaries you are going to release, I would use a Windows VM for that final step.