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No, not the kind “you get from kissin’”. The .NET platform project that allows you to run .NET apps on more platforms that just Windows. I heard about the mono project years ago, but until today really had no need to look at it. I have been avoiding .NET like the plague. However, when I started playing with the Amazon Simple Storage Service, I decided to use C# because XML deserialization was going to make the program a breeze.

I have gotten a nice little program going that I call S3Exploer that allows me to put files up and down with Amazon S3. But since I am a dual Mac/PC user, it has really been nagging at me that I would like the program to run on either platform. So I downloaded mono and began playing with it. I have to say, it is amazing, not flawless, but very good. So good it made me wonder why is it that an outside group can put something together that runs like this but microsoft hasn’t released a .NET VM for anything other that Windows?

With a little work, and a little cleanup of my code (mono actually uncovered a few areas I had overlooked) and a little playing with mono, I had my S3Explorer compiled in C# on Visual Studio 2003 on Windows running on my Mac in OSX! After about another hour or two of debugging/troubleshooting I had it fully functional on both platforms including a TreeView, a List View, XML Serialization/Deserialization, Cryptography (S3 requires hashes), WebRequest/Response, Input/Output Streams, Common Dialogs (Open/Save As), File IO….should I keep going?

As you can probably tell from this post I was quite impressed. If you want your .NET program to run on OSX or Linux take a serious look at the mono project.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Tech Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.