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Getting Started with .NET on the Mac

I'm setting out to learn .NET and get some experience creating a non-trivial project. Microsoft does provide Express (free, Windows-only) editions of the Visual Studio application in a few flavors as well as basic version of IIS with ASP.NET and SQL Server. But, since my current personal development environment is a MacBook Pro (OSX 10.6.7), getting started with development on .NET can actually cost money (mostly due to the Windows tax). The primary development tool for .NET developers on non-Windows systems seems to be Mono with MonoDevelop.

The latest stable release of Mono (2.10.1) supports much of the functionality of the .NET 4.0 platform and some portions of Microsoft's extended .NET eco-system: F#, IronRuby, IronPython, ASP.NET MVC(1, 2, and portions of 3).

The latest beta build of MonoDevelop (2.6 beta 2) provides a lot of support for developing applications using C# and the rest of the CLR.

I'll be using these in the coming months to do some experiments in the creation of a blogging engine in .NET. As part of proving that I can work in the .NET world. You can see the results of my experiments on my github page.

Mono also provides two other interesting projects:

  • Mono for Android -- run .NET applications on Android devices.
  • MonoTouch -- run .NET applications on iOS devices (iPhone, iTouch, iPad).

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