Mono / C＃的文档和构建系统

Question

I'm starting out on a new project and a team member has decided to use C# as the implementation language. I don't have a lot of experience in C#, but a brief reading shows that it's very capable of being a complete cross-platform vm. Beyond the language, I've been having trouble selecting tools and workflows for managing the code as the project grows. It should be fairly small (<10K lines) but I would like to have the ability to generate documentation as the project grows, manage any external dependencies that we decide to use, and automate builds and testing. I am wondering what tools are commonly used or considered best practices for this language.

I am mainly concerned with how would a build system potentially work on *nix as well as windows? Are there C# specific tools or is Make more common? In addition, I'd like to use a dvcs, but it doesn't look like Visual Studio and MonoDevelop support the same ones. What's the common vcs of choice for C#? For testing sort of Unit testing is available for C#/Mono? Finally, I know that there are good doc generators, but with the question of the build system, I would really like to have that just be a single step in the build similar to how testing is a step. Normally I'd automate with Hudson, but I am wondering if there is something more specific to the platform.

Overall, I'd love to see a solution that provides a decent workflow on both windows and *nix without a heavy admin burden. I am pretty sure this is the holy grail of project management, so anything that puts me on that path is awesome.

Answer 1

In a project I work on, we use Visual Studio 2010, MonoDevelop/XBuild, Git, and monodoc. Project files created by Visual Studio 2010 can easily be read by MonoDevelop and XBuild. Also, Git is an excellent VCS for distributed development (I especially like its branching). Monodoc, with some tweaking of command line parameters, can generate documentation from XML comments in code.

Answer 2

You can use any dvcs you'd like with it. MonoDevelop (at least in the trunk, not sure if it has been released yet) as Git support built in. There are some plugins for Visual Studio that give you Git too.

Either way though, you don't need your source control to be integrated within the IDE, infact I prefer it not to be and use Git from TortoiseGit if I'm in windows, or from the command line on OS X (although I'm looking at Gitti for the OS X side).

For build, I would suggest TeamCity, since it supports up to three remote agents allowing you to build on Windows/Linux/Mac with the free version.

For build I'd use NAnt, although xbuild under mono works with solution files so that might be easier rather than maintaining two build scripts. I like NAnt for CI simply because I find it easier to break apart into build, test, cover, package, deploy etc.

I've found that the combination of MonoDevelop, Git, TeamCity and NAnt gives you a few nice cross-platform development setup.

Answer 3

I suggest you try to use one IDE mainly. Most Mono IDEs support Visual Studio formats I guess. At least SharpDeveblop does.

http://mono-tools.com seems the correct way to develop for .NET and Mono only in Windows (not free). I think this is the best option if I ever take developing for mono seriously ina commercial environment, but not 1005 sure.

http://sharpdevelop.com looks promising too, but still fells like the poor man option.

http://monodevelop.com/ is the way to go for developing for Mono in Linux.

For DVCS you can always use Tortoise stuff and be IDE independent. git works great in Linux and TortoiseGit on Windows is very nice. However, it terms of fame, SVN (not DVCS of course) is still dominant, especially it's client can connect to TFS via bridge. Mercurial and Git are starting to take place in C# community though.

Answer 4

CruiseControl.Net is a pretty good build / continuous integration system. It can integrate a load of applications into the build process; we use NAnt for builds, NUnit unit tests and FXCop for code analysis.

Answer 5

Cake (C# Make) is an open source build automation system with a C# based domain specific language that can do things like compiling code, copy files/folders, running unit tests, compress files and build NuGet packages. It has tons of other built-in functionality and can easily be extended with custom code. It's available for Windows, Linux and OS X and can be used with several continuous integration systems such as AppVeyor, TeamCity, TFS, VSTS or Jenkins.