Best practices for .NET/MONO cross compiling

Question

What are the best practices for writing code that can be cross compiled on .NET (windows) and Mono (linux)? Although I am very familiar with .NET, I am not that experienced in Mono and all its gotchas. Has anyone seen a good blog post or best practices paper on this, which I have not been able to dig up? I would be sticking with C# 3.0 level features.

Things that concern me is first of all Interop, since I would need to call some native code. Next would be the best ways to handle namespaces such as Mono.XXX. Should I be using a bunch of #if? Isolate the code in per-platform assemblies?

Any suggestions regarding architecture and design would be greatly appreciated! If you have had any experience in cross compiling for Linux/Mono in visual studio (any version), I would also be interested in that.

Answer 1

The biggest issues are sticking to the Mono-supported APIs. Using the Visual Studio Integration support in Mono can help a lot with this, since you can target Mono the entire time, on all platforms.

For your specific questions:

1) Interop - You'll need to stick to P/Invoke. Try to isolate this into separate, platform specific assemblies. This leads to 2:

2) Using #if - I would avoid this, and prefer to use an extensibility model. Mono supports the Managed Extensibility Framework , which provides a good way to "plug in" platform specific code at runtime.

Answer 2

You should be interrested by Prebuild :

Prebuild is a cross-platform XML-driven pre-build tool which allows developers to easily generate project files for major IDE's and .NET development tools including: Visual Studio .NET 2002, 2003, 2005, SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop, NAnt and Autotools.

Answer 3

查看Mono迁移分析器

Answer 4

The Mono project provides a document with portability guidelines . That is a pretty good place to start.

Answer 5

We use MonoDevelop and Visual Studio for development but what's key is to keep around a good NAnt build script to build the entire thing on a single shot (Joel Spolsky's rules).

The main point IMO is to state very clear that the software has to be cross-platform, so it is not about "porting to linux/mono" but actually developing each iteration on the required platforms.

We had to avoid some features at the beginning (using Mono/.NET for 5 years now for a commercial product) and we still stick to .NET Remoting, but that's not a big deal in multi-platform development in my opinion.

Counting on the soft debugger since almost one year is also a great thing.