[MonoDevelop] Embedded Mono-runtime

[Matt Philmon]

Hi all,

First of all, I'm a long time Windows user and programmer that's just
started learning Linux. So, I'm definitely a 'newbie' in this arena so
please be nice. Anyway, I'm starting work on a project that involves a
client and server component. The client component will be written in C#,
primarily for Windows. I do hope that the Winforms support in Mono becomes a
reality along the roadmap layed out because then I can also 'easily' port
over the client to run on Linux. At any rate, the server component WILL be
written to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and I'm very interested in
determining whether I can accomplish this not only with Mono, but by using
MonoDevelop as the primary development tool IDE.

One of my concerns is that the server component we are trying to create must
be stupidly simple to install. We hope to release an RPM that will work
without requiring any re-compiles, etc or fancy script modifications. To
that end, the installation of Mono itself is quite difficult unless you
really know what you're doing, or you have rug or yum (Red Carpet or
Synaptic for visual users) with the proper repositories setup. I know in my
case my Fedora Core 2 distro came out of the box without the necessary
'services' setup to pull down and install Mono and being new to Linux it
took me a lot of reading to figure it all out. I have read that it's
possible to compile the Mono run-time into the executable so that the user
doesn't have to install Mono at all. If I can go this route that would be
great. I didn't see much in the way of being able to configure MonoDevelop
compiler options. Is this something that might find it's way into the
project as an option? If not, I imagine I can use MonoDevelop for debug
builds and then create my own script for release builds that does the
embedding. What do you think?

Matt