[Mono-dev] Building mono on Windows issues.

[Edward Ned Harvey (mono)]

> From: Alex J Lennon [mailto:ajlennon at dynamicdevices.co.uk]
> 
> We use Visual Studio (plus Resharper as Bryan so rightly says - couldn't
> get along without it) as we find this to be a productive development
> environment.

+1


> In addition there is a lot of development resource out there with people
> who know and are qualified on the VS toolchain.

+1 again


> From a productivity perspective and for risk management for testing and
> deployment I wish to be able to develop and debug under Visual Studio
> with Mono as a framework option.
> 
> I'd like to be able to do that with Mono on Windows as a check that no
> issues come up between running on the .NET framework and running on
> Mono.

You can do that.  Don't need to build mono on windows - just do a normal mono-for-windows install - I haven't done it in a while, but there's a plugin to run your code against the mono runtime instead of .Net.  I'm pretty sure it's free - might even be a standard extension you can find with the Extension manager.


> In addition I'd like to be able to remote debug to Embedded Linux with
> Visual Studio - which  I used to be able to do with Xamarin's Monotools
> Server before it disappeared.

Again, you don't need to build mono to do this.  But this feature I'm sure, is not free.  It's included in Xamarin Business.  They offer Visual Studio support as one of the features of Xam Bus.  It allows you to do remote debugging with VS running a mono app on some remote mac or linux mono machine.


> I'm currently investigating a VS plugin to replace Monotools Server
> which I've not had much luck with yet, but I'm optimistic:
> https://github.com/DynamicDevices/monodebugvs

Interesting.  I guess I have to take back what I just said about "I'm sure it's not free."   ;-)   Should revise:  I'm sure Xam offers a commercial solution, and apparently there is also some hope for a free alternative.

So all the above boils down to ...  As I said, the only reason I know you need to build mono on windows is if you want to step through the *mono* code, not just your own code.