Linux Blog

Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications. It is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .Net Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime.

There are several components that make up Mono:
C# Compiler - The C# compiler is feature complete for compiling C# 1.0 and 2.0 (ECMA), and also contains many of the C# 3.0 features.

Mono Runtime - The runtime implements the ECMA Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). The runtime provides a Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler, an Ahead-of-Time compiler (AOT), a library loader, the garbage collector, a threading system and interoperability functionality.


Base Class Library - The Mono platform provides a comprehensive set of classes that provide a solid foundation to build applications on. These classes are compatible with Microsoft's .Net Framework classes.

Mono Class Library - Mono also provides many classes that go above and beyond the Base Class Library provided by Microsoft. These provide additional functionality that are useful, especially in building Linux applications. Some examples are classes for Gtk+, Zip files, LDAP, OpenGL, Cairo, POSIX, etc.

Installing Mono (ASP.NET 2.0):
Open up the terminal Application > Accessories > Terminal and type following command

sudo apt-get install mono-xsp2 mono-xsp2-base
sudo apt-get install asp.net2-examples

This will install the mono development environment along with some sample applications. To run the sample applications, go to the terminal and type the following command to start the web server ..

nikesh@poison:~$ xsp2 --root /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/
xsp2
Listening on address: 0.0.0.0
Root directory: /usr/share/asp.net2-demos
Listening on port: 8080 (non-secure)
Hit Return to stop the server.

At this point, you’d want to navigate in your browser to http://localhost:8080/ and you should see a page similar to this:


Note: If you already have an application written in .Net, you can scan your application with the Mono Migration Analyzer (MoMA) to determine if your application uses anything not supported by Mono.