Salvatore Scarciglia wrote an email today to tell me their story of using Mono on Clinical Trials. His team currently uses Oracle Clinical Trials, but when they wanted new features, they decided that it was better for them to build their own software than licensing the extra modules they needed to grow.
Salvatore has a description of their project where he explains why they built the software using .NET in the first place (they were mostly a Microsoft shop, with Microsoft servers, and they liked Visual Studio).
Recently something changed:
I believe in Mono (take a look at the projects page of this site) and I think that it can grows very fast in the next years. When I read that one of the latest release of Mono supports almost all the .NET Framework 2.0 I've decided to try our framework with it. The original architecture based on:Windows Server 2003 + .NET Framework 2.0 + SQL Server 2005 has been substitute with:
Debian 4 + Apache + Mono 1.2.5 (mod_mono2) + MySQL (with .NET connector) and... it works !
It was very hard to rewrite all the stored procedures and views developed with T-SQL in SQL Server, but at the end all the "dirty" work was done. On the other hand Monodevelop 0.16 has compiled the entire framework with no errors. The .NET connector provided by the MySQL team works fine and, finally, Apache + mod_mono was not so easy to configure but I did it.
Using Microsoft technology you have the advantage to use the best development environment (Visual Studio 2005), a fully supported database engine (SQL Server 2005) and the availability of many documentation and tutorial sites (first of all the MSDN). Using Mono you have the great opportunity to develop in C# on Linux.
[Ed: some typos fixed by my speller while quoting.]
This has also been our experience: porting the stored procedures from a SQL server to another is probably the most time consuming piece of work and it is also not mandatory. Mono comes with a SQL Server provider, and if you just want to replace your front-end ASP.NET servers with Linux hosts, you can continue to talk to your backend MS SQL Server if you want to.
Sadly, it has also been our experience that the most difficult piece to setup in Mono is mod_mono. The last time I set it up it was difficult, and people regularly have problems setting it up. A year or so ago, we came up with a pretty cool extension to mod_mono that (in my mind) simplified the deployment: AutoHosting, but it does not seem to be enough.
Am hoping that the new the FastCGI support for Mono will make it simpler to configure for some setups.
If you are interested in porting your ASP.NET application to Linux, you will like Marek Habersack's tutorial on porting ASP.NET apps that covers many of the details.
Posted on 13 Nov 2007