.NET Development Along with Windows Computers

[Majorix]

Well my situation is like this: I run Ubuntu. A relative of mine wants me to develop .NET applications with him but he uses Windows, and so do the guys at his workplace. Now what I want is to be able to develop along with him but not switch to Windows.

The thing is, I tried to install Visual C# Express Edition but it asked for a service pack for IE, and I don't even have IE.

I also tried Mono, but couldn't get it to work. I believe it uses GTK# 2, which I am not sure Windows machines support? Plus, will these applications work along with the ones that are programmed under Windows? And how on earth do I place a button there that is not the size of the whole form? Is there a good tutorial that explains how to do it?

Thanks a lot.

[cdenley]

MonoDevelop does not have a visual form designer for winforms. Sharpdevelop does, but last I checked, it won't run in mono. You might want to try installing Sharpdevelop using wine. I think glade will run on windows, if your relative wants to switch to GTK#, and use glade instead of the MS visual form designer.

[hecato]

For get it running I gues the most fine thing is to go to the downloads and download the general Linux installation http://www.mono-project.com/Downloads


Linux Installer for x86 (All distributions)
It work OK, you can install it in you home folder without root permission, taht is fin if you whant to delet it :)... IRC it have an "unninstaller" and is supposed to work in almost all distros without much work, the last time I checked it installed and runned just fine in Ubuntu 6.10.

[Angry]

Perhaps limiting your project scope to .dll's would be sufficient. After all, I would think there should be a fair amount of work that is not gui-based that you could contribute to. That way you'll be able to separate logic from implementation (which it should be anyways) and any test harnesses you create for yourself can be in native GTK.

This is, however, subject to Mono making windows compliant dlls from Linux.

[nymphaeles]

I would do a Virtual XP machine.

[Majorix]

Thanks for the replies people.

@cdenley
I will try SharpDevelop asap.

@hecato
MonoDevelop is also in the repos, thats how I installed it. It works ok but I don't know how to use it :(

@Angry
Unfortunately I can't stick with .dll development. It's because those guys will be making the dll's. Those dll's require some formulas etc to be used, which requires construction engineering knowledge, and they are engineers while I am not. So I will be more or less working with the graphics.

@nymphaeles
My RAM is 512 mb and 250 mb of it is being used by Ubuntu. Running an extra machine on it would kill my computer :(

[cunawarit]

Despite me being an ASP.NET developer, I have never done any work on WinForms. I think last time I programmed a non-command line Windows application I used AWT and Java... A LONG time ago...

Anyway, as angry says, you can limit yourself to developing DLLs.

But if you can get Visual Express running somehow it would be great, I personally find it an awesome IDE, and if you haven't used it before it would be nice for you to give it a go :) Express is now my gratis .NET IDE of choice, I used to use SharpDevelop, it is very good! Last time I have MonoDevelop a go it wasn't bad at all, although it was a little unstable, on my machine at least.

[Majorix]

I DID use VS Express, and I liked it a lot. Thats why I tried to install that the first. But I couldn't get it to work because it asked for an IE update and another update I can't remember. Why on earth does it need IE update anyways? MS bull..

Could anybody get VS Express to work with Ubuntu? If you did so, can you write how you did it? Thanks a lot.

[Majorix]

*bump*

Any thoughts on how to install Visual Studio on Ubuntu?

[pmasiar]

If you will go back couple weeks (about 2 months IIRC) you will get into couple of rather heated discussions about why VS for Linux is not that good idea - in fact, why other solutions are preferred by many - and most of them are the weather-makers of C development.

I definitely do not want to repeat the experience :-) - so go dig the posts yourself.