Cross Platform Development with Mono

http://stephenhaunts.com/2014/04/28/cross-platform-development-with-mono/

by stevehaunts • 12 years ago

53 43 12 years ago

bigdubs• 12 years ago

I love Mono Develop / Xamarin studio, but it needs split panes desperately.

Interesting to see all the recent activity on HN about cross platform development. Seems like, as far as native code solutions go, C#/.NET is our best bet. As a C# junkie I'm excited about this, but also kinda sad that HTML5 cross platform development never really took off.

Edit: When I said "native code", I meant that Mono allows you to wrap native libraries with greater ease than anything else I've ever encountered.

rplnt• 12 years ago

What about Qt? With python, C++, whatever...

JasonFruit2• 12 years ago

I'm confused — how is C#.NET a "native code solution"? And what makes you say it's "our best bet"? I've been pretty pleased with PyGTK/PyQT cross-platform development, or, for that matter, Free Pascal LCL applications, if you want actual native code; I find them much less touchy to get working across platforms (though that could be just my relative level of experience with them).

leafartist3• 12 years ago

Have you tired c#.Net recently?

Touche3• 12 years ago

.NET isn't native code.

visualR6• 12 years ago

No but you can wrap native UI libraries, the most critical piece that needs to be native. Contrast this with an HTML CSS UI.

cwyers4• 12 years ago

There are multiple native compilers for .NET. Xamarin uses one for iOS and Android apps (well, in the case of Android, you're compiling to Dalvik bytecode, but it's just as native as any other Android app).

CmonDev4• 12 years ago

Of course it is not. It's a framework. C# on the other hand can compile to native. This is how it works on iOS.

adamors3• 12 years ago

.NET is definitely not our best bet, because once its out of Windows land, the quality falls sharply. Mono is seriously lacking [1] so does Monodevelop etc.

[1] http://mono-project.com/WPF

CmonDev4• 12 years ago

It really does feel like the best bet.

tempodox• 12 years ago

Mono is not “cross” platform. It infects your environment with .NET which is very much a platform.

untog• 12 years ago

It is an environment that allows your code to run on multiple platforms. It is cross platform.

CmonDev4• 12 years ago

Whole world is infected with JavaScript runtime - a much bigger problem - but it sort of works.

francisl2• 12 years ago

"I still really like the .NET environment and C# language, ... "

This is not my case, but I really do find value in learning a technology that helps you build cross-platform solution. I seriously considered using it.

"Thankfully, there is the Mono .NET implementation that I can use and it is really well supported."

But it's kind of unsupported and most of the time it lags behind. Currently on my brand new ubuntu system, it's version 3.2, on my "stable" ubuntu its 2.10. The current version is 3.4.

" As well as being open source, Mono also has a company, Xamarin, sponsoring its development as they use the mono system for their IOS and Android ..."

You cannot develop iOS nor Android application on Linux with Xamarin, You need Windows or OS X.

This is old bug still accurate. https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=142

This is an actual deal breaker for us. Haft of the team is using OS X and the other haft Ubuntu.

cwyers4• 12 years ago

"But it's kind of unsupported and most of the time it lags behind. Currently on my brand new ubuntu system, it's version 3.2, on my "stable" ubuntu its 2.10. The current version is 3.4."

Isn't that more of a problem with Debian/Ubuntu than it is Mono? You're not comparing what Mono's released to Microsoft's .NET runtime, you're comparing what Ubuntu ships to what Mono themselves have released.

francisl2• 12 years ago

I understand that is not the actual status and capabilities of mono. But if you want to ship your app and use the latest feature, this is a problem.

If it's a couch-developed app for your own use, this is not an issue.

billyhoffman2• 12 years ago

Have they fixed the bug where you can't copy/paste between mono apps and native OS X apps yet?

https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3106

Steps to reproduce the problem:

1. Copy some text in any non-mono application

2. Paste it to mono application.

Actual Results:

Copy&Paste doesn't work.

Expected Results:

Working clipboard.

How often does this happen?

Always.

Wow. So by cross platform they mean "unusable GUI apps on Macs"

visualR6• 12 years ago

If you were going to develop a mono app on osx you'd be better off using monomac than gtk#. Mono develop is written in gtk# and cut and paste works just fine on osx.

billyhoffman2• 12 years ago

My use case is the most basic one possible:

-Build a GUI app in C# -Run in on both my Windows dev machine (Windows 7), and my main desktop (OS X)

That's it. I don't care even what I have to use to build the app (Windows Forms, Stetic, etc).

Any advice?

leafartist3• 12 years ago

What you mean by "unusable GUI"? The same button you clicked to get to this page looks 99% and acts 100% the same on every platform. A button is a button. A textBox is a textBox no matter what any platform call it.

leafartist3• 12 years ago

This post inspired me to fire up my Linux mint virtual box and test mono. I'm every impressed by its potential. It does lack some awesome c# features like async/await. I've been using Xamarin for a while now and love it. My only fear for mono on Linux is the lack of XAML like interface equivalent. I dislike GTK. I'm keeping my fingers crossed :)

theflagbug• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure async/await is supported

Source: I'm using async/await in Xamarin.Android

Maybe it's because Linux Mint doesn't have the latest version of Mono in the package repository?

c0deporn• 12 years ago

Nice, I just gave a talk on Xamarin and building cross-platform native apps at a mobile workshop this weekend.

mwcampbell2• 12 years ago

I must strongly recommend against using Gtk+ as a GUI toolkit for any serious application except on GNU/Linux. The biggest reason for me is that Gtk+ has zero accessibility support on Windows or Mac. That is, it doesn't work with assistive technologies which people with some disabilities need, such as screen readers for blind people. If you develop an application using an inaccessible toolkit, you're erecting a barrier for some people who might need to use your app, particularly if it's going to be used in an educational or business setting.

So, what should you use instead? Qt is better, but not great. It's still bad enough that TeamTalk, a voice chat app that's popular among blind people, has a cross-platform Qt app but also a "classic" MFC app for Windows. The latter used to be the official Windows client, but is now maintained just for blind users.

wxWidgets is better in some ways, because it uses native controls on each platform. Except where it doesn't; for example, the data view control is non-native on Windows, whereas the list view control is non-native in the Mac and GTK ports. and wxHTML is non-native across the board. Still, with some pain, wxWidgets can be made to work for cross-platform accessible apps.

SWT might be a good choice, if you can make it work for .NET/Mono using IKVM.NET. SWT is better than wx in that where it has to use non-native controls, it implements the platform accessibility APIs; it helps that SWT is backed by IBM, which has the resources to put into this kind of thing, and the incentive to do so in the form of sales to government agencies and the like.

blub• 12 years ago

I'd be interested to know what kind of problems Qt has with accessibility, I have personally not used the QAccessible* classes yet and would appreciate any tips from the field.

Some potentially interesting blog posts: http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/category/accessibility/ I wonder what came out of the major upgrade in Qt 5, from looking around the web it seems to support MSAA fully and also I2A in some form.

mwcampbell2• 12 years ago

I haven't looked at the state of accessibility in Qt 5. I'll have to check that out.

rdtsc• 12 years ago

What are your thoughts on using a browser client library as a UI framework and write the UI in HTML? Like say use WebKit? I guess I can see how just doing the UI might be very doable but plugging that in with callbacks and the business logic a little tougher.

adamors3• 12 years ago

Do these people actually use Monodevelop daily? Because my and a lot of other people's experience beyond a Hello World program is dismal.

And until you actually have cross platform development tools that don't suck, .NET is not a viable option.

CmonDev4• 12 years ago

The authoring platform doesn't matter as long as the product is cross-platform. Just use Windows to get the best development experience. I mean people use Sublime which is like a notepad on steroids and don't complain.

adamors3• 12 years ago

The authoring platform doesn't matter as long as the product is cross-platform.

I think it matters a lot. That's why a lot of people don't care about .NET/C# actually, because they can't stand Windows.

herokusaki• 12 years ago

I haven't used it in a while but Tcl/Tk with Tile (now known as ttk) used to be a decent solution for cross-platform GUIs with native-looking widgets. Among other things it had top-tier Unicode support and a declarative layout system (compare: QML). Is it still viable?

Cross Platform Development with Mono

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