Followup question to comments here
My impression had been that Mono is a science project. Is that inaccurate? Extra credit for recounting personal usage.
My impression had been that Mono is a
science project. Is that inaccurate?
That is correct. A simple Wikipedia search gives details on the Mono project:
"Mono is a project created as an entry for Paul Revere High School's 2005 Science Fair, located on the west side of Boston. Although judges responded favorably to the project, it did not win or place in the fair. Its creator, Miguel de Icaza, received a B+ for his entry."
completely inaccurate.
mono is an implementation of a spec (just like .net is another implementation). its extremely complete and very usable.
I'm working on an asp.net mvc project that's being written in monodevelop and running in xsp2 (for now. I will probably set up an apache with mod_mono).
I've been a .net/mono guy for about 5-6 years and here are some things I've worked on:
instrumentation devices that work over gpib/serial/usb to do fiberoptics testing, moving robot arms, etc
networking tools
projects when I was in school in command line, AND in windows forms.
personal projects
image processing tools
monotouch to write iphone apps
I also use monodevelop as my main c# development platform. I do have visual studio 2008, but I prefer monodevelop as its lighter and runs on my mac.
Sure it's a science project. Just like Lisp, the Universal Turing Machine, REST, HTTP 1.1, google, and the basic idea that if we can treat functions as data and vice-versa then it should be possible to create programmable computing machines. Such machines could almost be called "computers" because they would be able to do much the same jobs as computers - the people hired in corporations and govt. departments to do mathematical calculations. Perhaps they'd even open up possibilities of doing things that a team of clerks with slide-rules couldn't do.
Starting as a science project doesn't mean the most it can ever achieve is a blue ribbon and an A+.
This page on the Mono site lists the applications published using Mono:
http://www.mono-project.com/Software
Some quite well-known ones include Unity3D, SourceGear Vault and Sims3.
I built a javascript interpreter/compiler with F# on an Ubuntu workstation and compiled it with Mono! Mono saved me from using Windows to develop my application.
Mono is not a science project and is used in many real-world applications.
It is an implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure ECMA standard.
See this list on the mono site.
It is used by wikis, SCMs, games, game development environments and many online applications.
The best example for me is Unity, it uses Mono/C# as it's scripting language.
Mono is used in a wide of of industries. From gaming (second life) to the embedded industrie.
Maybe it started as a science project, mono is doing it good and will be doing it good (a part is that there has not to be paid license money for some part of the use of it (not embedded part although where there has to be paid fees). Probelley some goodscentance to end: the makers of google started that as a university project too.
So to be answer quick, NO
Hey guys! Don't forget Plastic SCM!! Check the screenshots in the gallery. There are other projects but we do the best graphics :P
Some of our biggest production servers on big, big companies run Mono/Linux. And some even Mono/Solaris... And we rely on Mono for Mac too, of course.
Related
I have just finished studying C with some website, and I covered most of the basic-intermediate things.
Now I want to develop iPod\iPad apps, using Objective-C as I understood it's the best option.
But from reading many guides, I still haven't came across one sure answer - Can you develop iOS applications using Objective-C on a PC, Windows? I know you have to pay these 99$ to be allowed to develop and to be given access Apple classes, but it's okay with me.
If you can not do it on windows, what will be the next best option? I know you can create iOS games using Unity and C#, I have it installed but I still didn't find out how to create an iOS project. And I couldn't find a simple guide for iPod apps with unity, that would be nice, too.
If the best option is not unity, what will it be? I have intermediate-high knowledge in .NET (Thats the way it seems in the forums I'm usually at... here I am a simple beginner) and I know C# syntax the best, but I know VB too. And C, and a bit C++.
Thanks :)
the short answer is no. but there are ways around it if you don't want to put the app in the marketplace
You can code Objective-C in Windows, however you will not be able to compile. http://kdevelop.org/, http://code.google.com/p/objectiveclipse/ and http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html Dev-C++ are compatible with Objective-C, for example. I haven't had any experience with them, however.
XCode is still the best for this task, and I'm not sure if you would call this being able to "develop iOS applications on Windows", but I tend to code quite a bit in Notepad / GEdit anyway, so the answer is "kind of". You'll need a Mac to go anywhere further than coding though, like being able to debug.
The Unity iOS development does not come with the free version of Unity. Instead, you would have to purchase a separate license (in addition to the $99 that Apple will charge you to become a developer, I believe.) I myself have never used Unity to develop iOS games, so I don't know how well the process works.
Ideally, however, iOS development really is meant to be done on a Mac. XCode is the primary IDE used for iOS development and it is Mac-only.
Another option is to generate iOS game with Flex 4.5, which allows you to write and test code on windows and you can package it for iOS. But you have to learn ActionScript and MXML for it.
From Adobe's Website
Flash Builder 4.5 includes full support for building ActionScript® applications for Apple iOS. Flex support is planned to be available later in 2011
You can check out
Corono -- http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/
Unity -- http://unity3d.com/
Cocoa2d -- http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/
Depending on what you are looking, all of them has nice docs that you can go through about their capabilities.
I need to learn C#. All of my computers are Macs running the latest version of OS X. I do not want to use Windows, but I will if I must.
That being said, as a new programmer, can I learn C# efficiently with this Mono platform on OS X?
Edit I'm looking to learn C# to gain programming knowledge and start indie game development. After a reasonable understanding is achieved I will then look at some gaming frameworks/platforms and or a more OS specific language.
In a word: Yes.
First of all, thanks Jonathan Pobst for updating What Is Mono page. With that said, Mono supports all versions of C# at present, that is 1.0 to 4.0.
Since your plan is to learn the language first before looking into other things, such as frameworks and tools, you should be fine with Mono. Once you start getting into platform-specific development (i.e., Windows GUI), then you might want to consider switching over to a Windows machine.
http://mono-project.com/What_is_Mono
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_(programming_language)#Versions
If you are going to be developing for Windows, then using a Windows machine is your best bet. If you are simply trying to learn the language, Mono should be fine.
You should be able to, but just keep in mind that while most of the example code will work, some may not on the Mono framework as the implementation is not 100% compatible with .NET Framework. Also, of course some things like WPF aren't be supported by Mono.
I have used Monodevelop on Linux and it mostly works but because I also develop on Windows with VS2010, I am put off by using the inferior Monodevelop but as a newbie it shouldn't matter to you much.
Yes that should be fine seeing as MonoMac has come out. http://www.mono-project.com/MonoMac
If your wanting to use it for games with OpenGL, download this repo and look at the openGL stuff to get started. Then go to places like NeHe to learn more about GL ect..
You will need to download & install git to pull the repo:: http://git-scm.com/download
MonoMac Samples:: https://github.com/mono/monomac/tree/master/samples/
NeHe:: http://nehe.gamedev.net/
Code Sampler:: http://www.codesampler.com/
Depends.
To just learn the C# language and CLR core libraries which are not graphics related, C# / MonoDevelop is okay.
To learn graphics programming, game programming for OS X, I suggest you first learn Objective-C, Cocoa and then MonoDevelop/MonoMac. The reason is that the Cocoa API's are designed around the Objective-C language which has fundamental differences to C#. Using Cocoa via C# is easy to begin with, but quickly makes little sense unless you understand Cocoa patterns & Objective-C.
Is there any way possible to run C# code on a BlackBerry OS smartphone? I've got some Windows Mobile 5.x/6.0 frameworks written in C# that my team needs to "port" to various smartphone platform. We're looking at the following smartphone OS's:
Windows Phone 7 - VS 2010, Windows Phone Developer Tool CTP, Silverlight, XNA
iOS - MonoTouch, MonoDevelop IDE
Android - MonoDroid (when released), MonoDevelop IDE, Mono Tools for Visual Studio
BlackBerry OS - ???
Research didn't turn up any other programming options for BlackBerry OS but Java/J2ME. I know it's a long shot but was hoping someone here might know of some other options. At this point, I'd even consider a C#-to-Java translator.
Thanks in advance.
No, your only options for BlackBerry apps are:
J2ME/CLDC native app
BlackBerry widget using Javascript/HTML
Maybe soon, this is from august 09, so maybe late summer?.
We’ve been gathering details over the
past month or so on this, and it’s
pretty much confirmed: Research In
Motion is planning on integrating full
Flash and Microsoft Silverlight
support into their BlackBerry web
browser. Read that again boys and
girls — full Flash support, not Flash
lite. You know when the word
“planning” is used in the same
sentence as RIM, however, that it
probably means it’s a while away. And
it is. We’ve been told this won’t
happen until next summer or right
before it as RIM needs their devices
to be more beefed up as well as have
access to higher data speeds for this
to work effectively (HSPA and LTE).
RIM has already achieved over 10Mbps
downloads on next generation
BlackBerrys in the test labs with test
LTE equipment so it’s looking good,
folks.
How could I run a game made with XNA on the iPhone/iTouch? Which steps/tools (existing ones or imaginary...) should be used?
Note: The goal is to avoid modifying existing C# code
UPDATE :
If I understand correctly, I must be able to:
Run my XNA code on Mono (monoxna or SilverSprite, promising?)
Run Mono on iPhone (MonoTouch)
Not only is it possible but here is a video of someone doing XnaTouch on MonoTouch: First game to IPhone build with XnaTouch (XNA for IPhone)
Here is the mono article about doing it http://www.mono-project.com/MonoTouch
I don't believe there is a good answer to your question. XNA doesn't target the iPhone, so the chances of being able to effectively port an XNA game without modifying the C# source code isn't likely to happen.
Instead, I'd recommend that you take a look at the various frameworks that exist to help you craft cross-platform games. Unity often comes up in these discussions, but it isn't free.
If cross-platform isn't your goal, but free iPhone development is, then I'd recommend looking at Cocos.
Edit: The MonoTouch project may be able to assist you in the future, but doesn't help you out right now. Still, it's something to keep an eye on.
Edit: The landscape has changed a lot in the ~5 years since this question was posted. If you have an XNA project that you want to get running on iOS, then Xamarin.iOS (formerly MonoTouch) plus MonoGame is a near-perfect fit. MonoGame is missing a huge chunk of the XNA content pipeline, which means you'll either have to abandon it or have a VS2010 instance somewhere compiling your assets.
The MonoTouch project may eventually help here, since it allows you to write C# targeting the iPhone (it is statically compiled to native code).
MonoGame is a free OpenGL implementation of the XNA 4.0 Framework. It is built upon the excellent range of Mono compilers and is compatible with MonoTouch (iOS), Mono for Android (Android), MonoMac (Mac OS X), Mono for Windows and now Linux!
A list of 12 games currently using MonoGame that are on the Apple iOS App Store can be found #
http://monogame.codeplex.com/
https://github.com/mono/MonoGame/wiki/Released-Games
I believe XNA depends on Direct3D 9 (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/aa937793.aspx), which may hint at the hurdles one might encounter in both porting to mono as well as having sufficient graphics horsepower on iPhone.
Everyone saying this is possible because there are CLR libraries for Mono, does not even think about the fact that XNA is a WHOLE DIFFERENT set of frameworks:
"The XNA Framework class library is a library of classes, interfaces, and value types that are included in XNA Game Studio."
As another responder noted, this is so far from happening it's not even funny. If you really want to write a game I'd check out Unity. It's commercial, but it looks utterly impressive and you can script your game logic in Javascript or (here's the funny part) C#!
Yes, instead of going through a ton of work to port a whole framework because you want to write a game in C#, why not just use a framework that lets you do that today?
From the horse's mouth:
MonoTouch + SilverSprite = XNA 2D
games on iPhone? :)
What Bill means is that it will eventually be feasible to write a 2D XNA game, then use SilverSprite to run it on Silverlight, then use MonoTouch to run it on the iPhone
This space is definitely heating up. There is now an XNA Touch project on codeplex that aims to bring the XNA API onto the iPhone/iPad platform:
http://xnatouch.codeplex.com/
'Maybe' you could just change XnaTouch's namespace to match those of existing Xna code (i.e. Microsoft.Xna.Framework.*), when developing a MonoTouch project? This could be done on a vendor fork (copy) of the XnaTouch code, easy to manage using Git, Mercurial or Piston etc.
I'm unsure as to whether the XnaTouch team would undertake such a change on its own codebase, so this is probably best done on your own, personal, code branches (interestingly, the Mono.xna project uses the original Microsoft.Xna.Framework.* namespaces, I'm unsure why XnaTouch chose not do so).
JFYI, the current XnaTouch (v1.0) follows Xna 4.0 quite faithfully. I've found a [small] few missing method calls, which I've 'implemented' to throw not implemented exceptions (?). The original-xna4-and-modified-xna-touch code does compile, now I need to implement iphone-specific gui and handling etc.
Hope this helps someone.
Cheers
Rich
For starters you would need a CLR implementation on the iPhone, which doesn't exist at the moment, but it seems someone is trying: MonoTouch.
A friend of mine is developing an architecture port of XNA 4.0 for the iOS platform. It's of course written in Objective-C, but it has the feel of XNA. He has published the source under LGPL at http://code.google.com/p/xni/.
Xna is not officially supported on iPhone; however, you could use ExEn (http://exen.codeplex.com/) or MonoGame (http://monogame.codeplex.com/) to port your Xna games. A bonus for using either of these is that they support Mono for Android.
If you're looking for a free cross-platform sort of thing, you could check out phonegap. I don't have any experience with it but it looks cool.
http://phonegap.com/
We are at a crossroad as what development tool to use for our application. We do not know if
we will go for Adobe Air or use the traditional road which is Objective-C and Cocoa. The software is similar to www.riffmasterpro in functionality. Is Air the best solution here?
Well, firstly, Flash isn't supported on iPhone so there is no Air platform for iPhone (at least, none that I know of - correct me if I'm wrong).
Secondly, native Objective-C applications on Mac will always surpass Air applications with regards to how well they tie into the OS. An example of this is TweetDeck. It's an amazing application but it just doesn't feel like a Mac app (no meaningful menus, no growl integration, etc...). Mac users are typically very specific with regards to how their apps behave.
I would advise that if you want to write Mac applications (and iPhone applications) to rather stick with Objective-C.
If your primary concern is cross-platform (with the exception of iPhone) then Air is an option worth considering.
If you're looking to build an app solely for the Mac/iPhone platform, I would suggest using Objective-C instead. Adobe AIR's strength is that it can be installed and used cross-platform with little problem.
One of the downsides of that, though, is that performance will never be as good as something that ties directly into the operation system.
problem of using middle frameworks is that you will never have the potential of the hardware, in other worlds you will not be able to use any feature that Mac/Windows can give to you by the hardware, you wll always be attached to what the framework will give to you and hope that you can do everything that you need...
specially in your music application.
regarding the Adobe Air framework, it is a good idea to cover both Linux, Mac and Windows computers but you will not be able to run it under the iPhone because there is no Adobe Flash supported... Adobe is making a flash player for the iPhone, but I do believe that will ot support Air, at least by the near future.
For the iPhone you can build a Web Application or a SDK Application, the last on, and if you will use SDK 3.0, you will find plenty of good things to use it to, but you need to develop a full application from sctrath.