Skip to main content

.NET and MONO

I’ve been working on a personal project with a friend for quite a while now.  To make a long story short it deals with loading/editing/saving large quantities of public geographic data. Lately we have been throwing around the idea of having our database server’s OS in Linux instead of Windows 2000.

Which brings me to the MONO project. I’ve started testing some code I wrote in C# (a console application that accesses the Internet) by using that MS Virtual PC program I setup in my previous posting with Xubuntu. While my current goal changed a bit, I’m glad to start getting some use out of it. Basically, all I needed to do was install the mono run-time libraries and I was good to go. Now keep in mind that some Linux distributions might only have older versions of MONO available by way of a package manager (or pre-install). In this case you should see if your .NET application requires something that the available version of MONO does not have by visiting the mono project website. Otherwise you need install MONO from source (search google for a tutorial, I’ve seen at least one).

I have had one issue so far in how I wrote my application. File paths are of course difference between Windows and Linux. The issue that I’m looking into has to deal with the path separators \ and /. I currently have the program hard coded to take a path specified and append a \ between that and a filename. In linux this doesn’t work properly, so the path and filename are a bit screwed up. More specifically if I specify /home/username/Desktop, the program will save into /home/username with a filename of /Desktop-filename.ext… I’ll update this or make a new posting once I figure out how to fix that.

EDIT: This page on the mono site details about path separators.
“To write portable software, you must make sure that you use the System.IO.Path.DirectorySeparatorChar (System.IO.Path.DirectorySeparatorChar) character when you must concatenate paths, or even better, use the System.IO.Path.Combine (System.IO.Path.Combine(string,string)) method to combine pathnames.”

All that being said, I noticed on go-mono.com that they offer a VMWare file that has the latest version of MONO pre-installed on OpenSUSE Linux. I’m currently in the process of downloading the ISO and the VMWare Player and will see if it is any better than Virtual PC with Xubuntu that I’m currently using.

2nd EDIT: Started trying out VMWare and the MONO SUSE Linux image. It’s much much better than Using the MS VIrtual PC program. So I suggest you go that route if you are interested in trying something similar.

3rd EDIT: Sun VirtualBox looks like a good program to use too. It’s freely available and seems to have more features than the free VMWare does.

I’m impressed with MONO so far!

Popular posts from this blog

ChatGPT is a new, and faster, way to do programming!

Currently ChatGPT is in a free “initial research preview” . One of its well known use cases at this point is generating software code. I’ve also just used it to write most of this article… Well, actually a future article about cleaning up SRT subtitle files of their metadata faster than I have been by hand with Notepad++ and its replace functionality. Update: I recorded a screencast of writing the SRT subtitle cleaner application loading and processing portion. I relied heavily on ChatGPT for code. It was a fun process! https://youtu.be/TkEW39OloUA ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a powerful language model that can assist developers in a variety of tasks, including natural language processing and text generation. One such task that ChatGPT can help with is creating an SRT cleaner program. SRT, or SubRip Subtitle, files are commonly used to add subtitles to video files. However, these files can become cluttered with unnecessary information, such as timing lines or blank spaces. To clean...

Theme error in 2010s Android App after AppCompat Migration

I plan on releasing a lot of my old work as GPL open source, but most of it has aged to the point that it no longer functions, or if it does work it’s running in compatibility mode. Basically it’s no longer best practices. Not a good way to start off any new public GPL projects, in my opinion. The current project I’m working on is an Android app that calculates star trails meant to help photographers get or avoid that in their night time photos. For now I’m going to skip some of the import process because I didn’t document it exactly. It’s been mostly trial and error as I poke around Android Studio post import. The Android Studio import process… Removing Admob Google Play code before the project would run at all. After removing dependencies, it kind of worked, but when running it in the emulator it shows a pop-up message saying that the app was developed for an old version of Android. Going through the process of updating code to match current best practices… I had the IDE convert the ...

Printing to file in Linux WINE

I noticed that this post has been sitting as a draft since 2011. At this point I have no idea if it’s useful or what I was even doing, but I might as well make it public in case someone can find it helpful! So I’ve been trying to get one of those PDF print drivers working in WINE without success. I then came upon a process that might work. When printing you need to select the checkbox “Print to file” that creates a .prn file. Just Linux things... I was using a program that only has printing facilities, but I want to export around 100 pages of text and images. Once you have the .prn (postscript) file, you can do any number of things to it. In my case I want the postscript file to be converted to HTML. I am also considering PDF format because that has more conversion options to eventually get me to HTML or plain text. sudo apt-get install cups-pdf Or it looks like that package might have changed to this… sudo apt-get install printer-driver-cups-pdf Where PDFs would be generated in /home/...