With this amount of information I think the answer is inconclusive; and depends heavily on your time frame. Just as one example, if your app uses only (or mostly) WinForms features from the v1.1 release of .NET you'll have a much easier time in the short term. My app uses a number of v2.0 features such as ToolStrips, MenuStrips, MDI forms, etc, and I have to hack things a bit (today) to get the app to work properly. More and more of these newer features are completed every day; but it will still be weeks before my app has 100% support and I don't have to hack anything. And you'll have to be more specific about your app having "heavy reliance on GDI+". Does that mean you're making many GDI+ function calls directly using p/invoke? If so, that's going to significantly complicate things for you. Obviously if your app has platform-specific stuff in it then porting it is a chore :)
My hunch is that based on your experience level you'll be more successful developing and building with Visual Studio. You can run the VS binaries on mono directly. There's no need to build with mono if you're also building in Visual Studio. If you're using the latest stable release and you had no errors during the installation you'll have to be more specific about what's not working. If you take a binary compiled using Visual Studio that doesn't use platform-specific p/invoke function calls and copy it to your linux machine you should be able to run it with the command line "mono my-app.exe". If that fails I'd recommend first checking your $LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable and-or the /etc/ld.so.conf paths. If that fails you can get some more help by changing your command line to "MONO_LOG_LEVEL=Debug mono my-app.exe". However, this isn't as simple as installing a shareware app on Windows and running it. If it doesn't work you'll have to send information about any error messages you're getting and your setup. Simply saying that you tried it and it doesn't work, and asking for a set of steps, is never going to produce a good result. The steps *are* available on the web site and they *do* work, however the level of expertise they assume is open to some debate. So if something isn't working instead of saying "the steps are not working, where should I get better instructions?" you should consider saying "everything seems to be working up until I do (fill in the blank) at which point I get error message (fill in the blank) which is unexpected. I did these steps (fill in the blank) which should have satisfied the error I'm getting, but the error is still there. Any ideas on what the error means?" and you'll get much father. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Denis B Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2007 10:44 PM To: mono-winforms-list@lists.ximian.com Subject: Re: [Mono-winforms-list] WinForms On Linux Hi Dan, To introduce myself quickly, I am lead of a small development team of engineering software. The application is client/server written in VB.Net and MSSQL. I am looking at the feasibility of supporting linux and thought I would take a look at how useable Mono is. I am a relative linux newb. I am not really fussed about missing VB specific features in Mono because they can be recoded easily however I have a heavy reliance on WinForms and GDI+. I have recently installed Feisty Ubuntu and installed Mono/MonoDevelop from the package manager on my home machine to have a play and havent got very far. Windows.Forms is part of a standard Mono installation. I cant see how to reference and/or use it. I have been occasionally checking http://www.mono-project.com/ over quite a long time. http://www.mono-project.com/WinForms provides some background info, nothing of any use really. The development weblog it references was last updated Feb 06. I am happy using the latest stable release so I hope I dont have to compile my own version. Is there a simple way of getting up and running with WinForms? Is there a decent way to develop WinForms in Linux or would I be better off staying in Windows and using Visual Studio (and then trying to compile under Mono and run results on Linux)? If there are any other website with information please point me in the right direction, I have tried the mono website, mailing list, various blogs, Wikipedia and whatever Google has thrown up to try and find my way. Thanks, Denis Maser, Dan wrote: > > Yes, it does work. Naturally if you do something (just as an > example) that calls into the Win32 api directly you'll have to make some > changes to your code to let it do the equiv on linux. All the steps > are on the mono web site. If you have a more specific question about an > error your getting then perhaps this mailing list might be a good place > to start. But for general steps on how to start: > > 1. Read as much of the http://www.mono-project.com/ web site as you can. > 2. Pay close attention to http://www.mono-project.com/Compiling_Mono and > http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Winforms > > -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/WinForms-On-Linux-tf3674425.html#a10316607 Sent from the Mono - WinForms mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Mono-winforms-list maillist - Mono-winforms-list@lists.ximian.com http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-winforms-list _______________________________________________ Mono-winforms-list maillist - Mono-winforms-list@lists.ximian.com http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-winforms-list