Using Visual Studio to make an Mono web app

blakeyrat

I'm planning on developing a new ASPX site, to be developed in Visual Studio but hosted by Mono's web server. What are the gotchas I need to be aware of? How close are the two environments? Slightly more specifically, I'm worried about things like database access-- does Mono have its own version of System.Data.SqlClient? Is it equivalent to the Microsoft version of same?

My vague impression is that as long as you stick in the System namespace and write code assuming .net 3.0 you're ok. Is that impression accurate?

apapadimoulis

We were pleasently surprised to learn that BuildMaster worked mostly fine* under Mono. I'd avoid anything too new (MVC, .NET4) -- I'm sure it works, but I'd hate to discover a NotImplementedException late in the game.

Mono does, supposedly, support SQL Server via the standard ADO.NET interface (System.Data.SqlClient).

* few obnoxious gotchas, like the internal implementation of datetime is different, which means a binary serialization between Windows and Mono ends in fail

blakeyrat

@Alex Papadimoulis said:

Mono does, supposedly, support SQL Server via the standard ADO.NET interface (System.Data.SqlClient).

Supposedly?

@Alex Papadimoulis said:

* few obnoxious gotchas, like the internal implementation of datetime is different, which means a binary serialization between Windows and Mono ends in fail

Not an issue for me; I plan on using the Mono web server for both development and production. I just want to use Visual Studio as the IDE, since it's a really slick IDE.

Thanks for the reply, confirms my vague impressions.

locallunatic

@blakeyrat said:

@Alex Papadimoulis said:
* few obnoxious gotchas, like the internal implementation of datetime is different, which means a binary serialization between Windows and Mono ends in fail

Not an issue for me; I plan on using the Mono web server for both development and production. I just want to use Visual Studio as the IDE, since it's a really slick IDE.

Thanks for the reply, confirms my vague impressions.

I remember occasional complaints from friends who supported projects between the two cause of things with the lower level implementations having slight differences, but was a while back and more to do with getting them to play nice with each other like Alex was pointing out could be trouble. Sounds like you shouldn't have to worry about it, but would suggest an extra block of Dev and QA time to catch any subtle diffs in behavior ('course if your code is dependent on subtle tweak stuff that may be diff between the two there are other issues).