I was quite intrigued by the chance of having .NET applications also run on my beloved iMac, but I'm quite terminalphobic -- so, after having seen that .NET exes work on my Mac (yeah!), I've written a small starter .app to run exes by double-clicking.
THINGS IT DOES:
- It works with both mono and ilrun (portable.net).
- Starts applications in Mac OS X's Terminal.app.
- Registers .exes and .dlls with cute, shiny, handmade, emblazoned-with-mono-logo custom icons, removing that ugly Virtual PC icon from them (which is Windows's default icon for exes, just stretched to 128x128. Not "redrawn to look good in 128x128". Just 32x32 icons stretched to that size. Ugh).
- Detects "mono" and "ilrun" by watching into common directories (/usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /opt/local/bin, /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework and so on).
- If a .NET environment is not detected, it offers the user a chance to install Mono or Portable.NET from a PKG (if such a package is put into the program's Resources folder) or, if none is available, shows links to go-mono.org and dotgnu.org. Which means that the program allows for dumb-proof drag'n'drop installation of Mono (by taking "extra steps" on first launch as per Apple Human Interface Guidelines).
- Can be configured to launch X11 along with the Terminal, allowing programs that use Windows.Forms or other windowing toolkits to start correctly.
THINGS IT DOESN'T DO:
- The preferences aren't complete yet - they don't disable the "Use Mono" or "Use DotGNU" option even when the corresponding piece of software isn't available, very possibly leading to bad behavior (NullPointerExceptions suddenly finding their way into the Console at the very least).
- It doesn't allow the user to turn off the Terminal -- that is, to load the .exe without having the Terminal window show up. Mainly because I'm lazy.
- It doesn't make any coffee.
- It has no way of intelligently understanding whether a program is console-only or uses a windowing toolkit, so you must activate or deactivate X11 manually for now.
- It does not pass any command-line parameters to the .exe being started. Again that's because I'm just lazy.
You can find the .app (with no .pkg inside its Resource folder) at http://matrixtcg.altervista.org/monostarter.zip and source at http://matrixtcg.altervista.org/monostarter.src.zip (pay attention: the .xcode project refers to a portable.net.pkg that isn't there for size reasons. Just remove it, the program will detect the absence of pkgs in the Resources folder and work just fine). I haven't included a license in the .zip but I will soon, and it will be GPL.
- e. v. aka l0ne
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