Can I use Visual Studio to develop Mono applications?

1
votes

I have developed a .NET 4.5 application using WinForms. I want my application to run not only on Windows, but also on Linux, so I decided to port it to Mono.

However, I can't find any information on how to use Visual Studio for Mono. I don't want to switch to MonoDevelop, since VS provides much of the functionality I want and I am already familiar with it.

There apparently used to be something called Mono Tools for Visual Studio, which David Lively insists works on current VS editions, but I don't want to run an extension that was deprecated 3 years ago. I don't even know where to download the extension - it redirects to Xamarin, and Xamarin seems like not what I want because while it mentions VS integration, it forces me to install a bunch of Android and Java SDKs (why?).

As far as I can see, .NET and Mono code looks fairly similar, and there are 3 main concerns:

  • Making VS use the Mono compiler instead of the C# compiler, so I can tell if non-Windows users can compile my source, and also get notified about missing libraries
  • Making IntelliSense suggest only Mono-supported things
  • Making the "Run" command run the application using Mono, not .NET, so I can test it correctly

Is there really no easy way of accomplishing these?

Note: I want to develop Windows and Linux desktop apps, with a WinForms GUI or equivalent only. I am not interested in mobile.

1
linuxvisual-studio-2013monocross-platform

1 Answers

0
votes

In general, you can just target .NET 4.5 and compile with Visual Studio and the resulting assembly works as-is on Mono (assuming you don't use platform-specific stuff via p/invoke, etc).

Mono's WinForms support isn't perfect though (and nobody actively works on it), so you still need to test by running the app directly on Mono. Missing APIs aren't usually the problem, it's more that the Mono implementation has different behavior/bugs.

Another alternative to WinForms might be Xwt.