Mono on OS X Compatible with MSVC 2010 peers?

Question

I'm to begin .NET development at work but have the option of using MonoDevelop/Mono on OS X instead of MSVC 2010 on Windows and would prefer it because of my familiarity with OS X. We are likely going to use a number of popular frameworks, such as NHibernate and Castle DI - my question to those of you familiar with .NET development and Mono: will I be at much of a disadvantage? Are there strong incompatibilities or, with some "paper cuts", the two systems are roughly compatible? Again, my colleagues will be using MSVC 2010 and we intend on working on the same codebases together.

Thanks for any insight you can give to this .NET newbie.

EDIT: I should note I'll primarily be doing development with MVC 2, which I understand does work with Mono, and will have some leeward in choosing frameworks, ie I can avoid highly incompatible frameworks.

Answer 1

The Mono Migration Analyzer can help you work out if you're using any libraries that won't execute under Mono.

MonoDevelop is becoming quite feature rich. I haven't had many issues with it.

Answer 2

I can only offer a limited case study -- I was a tools developer at a large games company, using .NET / Visual Studio for 5+ years. I recently left to help start a small new studio -- we're using the Unity game engine, which uses Mono as a scripting backbone. I've now been working with Mono for about 8 months, and none of the .NET libraries I've found myself wanting to use have had any incompatibilities that I've noticed.

Pretty limited sampling, though, so unlikely to cover all your use cases -- mostly just System, System.IO, System.Xml, System.Web, System.Collections(.Generic) and other basic stuff.

Mono Develop has been reasonable so far, but not as feature-rich as VS.

Disclaimer: We don't cross compile to MS.NET and Mono.

Answer 3

MonoDevelop can without problems open VS 2010 projects.
However, you won't be able to graphically develop WinForms with mono.

Nhibernate works, but debugging with MonoDevelop Is hard and step-through doesn't really work.
In other Words: It's possible but you're on a definite disadvantage.