Mono Tools for Visual Studio

by Miguel de Icaza

Today is a big day for the Mono team, we just released the Mono Tools for Visual Studio. The goal of this release is to make it simpler for Visual Studio developers to deploy their applications on Linux. ASP.NET, Windows.Forms, server and console applications are supported. These are the major features in the release:

Deploy to Linux: You can deploy from Visual Studio to a Linux machine running Mono your software. We are using Universal Plug and Play to detect Linux machines on your local network, or you can enter the IP address of your favorite hosting provider.

Debug Linux system remotely from Visual Studio: Developers complained that our debugging story left much to be desired, that deploying to Linux was possible, but debugging cumbersome. We now allow you to debug your application running on Linux without ever having to leave Visual Studio.

You can continue to edit, build and debug the way you have always done it, but the software will be running on a Linux machine:

We hooked the Mono debugging engine to Visual Studio, so all the regular debugging tasks are available (watches, locals, breakpoints, stepping) that you come to expect from Visual Studio debugging are available.

Review your code for portability: We have integrated Mono's Migration Analysis (MOMA) tool into Visual Studio so you can check your software for Windows/Linux differences right from your IDE and work around APIs that do not exist in Linux or Mono and refactor your code accordingly.

Package your software for Linux: Right from Visual Studio you can package your .NET application in Linux native installation format. Just create a packaging project in your solution, configure your package and produce an RPM that you can distribute:

And finally, one of the most exciting features in this tool: go from shipping applications into shipping appliances in minutes:

You use our wizard to prepare your appliance, select a base operating system template (Server, Client, and base operating system) and off you go.

Once your appliance is built, you can test it and apply the finishing touches over the web (using a Flash applet that connects to our virtual machines in our data center) and when you are happy with the results, you can download and redistribute your appliance to your users.

Appliances

Earlier this year I wrote about Novell's SUSE Studio our hosted service that helps developers create ready-to-run appliances.

Today, as a .NET developer, when you distribute your software to your users and customers, you probably have a list of requirements that goes like this:

Install Windows XXX, Reboot.
Install security updates A through Z, reboot as many times as needed.
Install .NET runtime, reboot as needed.
Install SQL server, reboot as needed.
Populate database, reboot as needed.
Install third party tool, reboot as needed.
Just to be sure, reboot.

Then your users can start installing your software. At that point, you initiate a series of support calls that go like this:

Did you make sure that .NET xxx.yy was installed? Ah, so do that and resume the steps.
Wrong databases, uninstall, reboot, reinstall database, reboot.

And repeat the above process for every single one of your users.

Basically, every user has to repeat the same steps. Everyone has to assemble the solutions made up of the operating system, various pieces of dependencies that you have and your software, like this:

The experience today is like trying to buy a car by buying the individual parts:

We believe that for a class of developers there is a better way.

We believe that we can help you put together the full car, and deliver the car in a single piece.

With appliances you can ship a pre-configured operating system, pre-configured database and every service pre-configured and installed together with your software to deliver a full package, so you prepare your software for distribution once, you configure the database once, and then you give your users a ready-to-run virtual machine, CD-ROM or USB stick:

SUSE Studio has been used to build Linux based appliances (over four thousand per week), and now we are making it easy for .NET developers to take advantage of one of Linux's strengths: it is free, it is open source, you can shrink it, you can grow it and you can ship your own version (and yes, we do provide the updates for all of the core components that you pick).