[Mono-devel-list] Methodology with file permissions

[Jason Starin | Giant Head]

Hello, first things first:

I have a CVS build of Mono (rebuilt yesterday) on a Fedora Core 2 system, an
ASP.NET application that runs fine on a windows machine, and am trying to
figure out the best steps for porting it over to the Mono runtime
environment.  I've built hello world, I've played with a few tests, but if
I'm going to do this, I need to get a feel for how to build something with a
little more meat.  I'll also mention, that a few days ago I had a Redhat 9
system evaporate with a perfectly good Mono runtime, but that I think some
of its problems loading X manager may have been linked to some of the
libraries I had to exchange to get Mono to work on it.  It wasn't the best
system, but it got me through a few of the initiations in Mono.

What are the steps (suggestions for course of action or plain old advice for
how to shoot the rapids) to porting this application over in its entirety?

The application has a few web forms with standard HTML components
(runat="server" etcetera), some scripts, and the big whopper, it writes an
XML file on the server, validates it with an XSD, then opens a port to MySQL
and uploads the file through a connection C# app written with Altova's
MapForce (which has thankfully generated some code for Mono as well as the
stuff that already makes the IIS version work). But that's not all.  It uses
some XSLT to juggle the file and build an XML file holding a single entry,
bind it to an XSL file, and build a web page in html through about 4
transformations.  There's a scripted method for bringing the entry back from
the database and rebuilding the core file, which isn't nearly as important
as the rest of this, and should be pretty easy after the other concepts are
solid.

What I'm looking for are either some example paths or some pointers to build
each piece into a functional piece and then finalize the whole thing as one
big collection of services run by a master application.

I see the common breakdown as something like:
1.  Figure out how Mono handles XSLT and see what I need to do to make that
call work (That gives me something spiffy to look at)
2.  Figure out how to connect to MySQL so I can see if I need to query for
info in the file
3.  Figure out how to validate with an XSD in the Mono environment
4.  Figure out how to keep Mono from showing off my scripts to the rest of
the world, instead of running them like I tell it to
5.  Figure out how to make the file write permissions work with a Mono based
application.  (In an IIS machine, I'd just assign a user permission to the
directory named ASPNET local, and make certain there couldn't be an ASPNET
remote.  I'm far more sketchy of doing this with a Linux machine.  This is
where I need a lot of thinking--and was hoping I could borrow some thoughts
from others.

Web links are encouraged, and command line by command line examples are also
greatly appreciated, but I'm willing to take whatever can be given, that
helps point me in the right direction.

Jason Starin