.net – Best practices for .NET/MONO cross compiling

mononet

What are the best practices for writing code that can be cross compiled on .NET (windows) and Mono (linux)? Although I am very familiar with .NET, I am not that experienced in Mono and all its gotchas. Has anyone seen a good blog post or best practices paper on this, which I have not been able to dig up? I would be sticking with C# 3.0 level features.

Things that concern me is first of all Interop, since I would need to call some native code.
Next would be the best ways to handle namespaces such as Mono.XXX. Should I be using a bunch of #if? Isolate the code in per-platform assemblies?

Any suggestions regarding architecture and design would be greatly appreciated!
If you have had any experience in cross compiling for Linux/Mono in visual studio (any version), I would also be interested in that.

Best Answer

The biggest issues are sticking to the Mono-supported APIs. Using the Visual Studio Integration support in Mono can help a lot with this, since you can target Mono the entire time, on all platforms.

For your specific questions:

1) Interop - You'll need to stick to P/Invoke. Try to isolate this into separate, platform specific assemblies. This leads to 2:

2) Using #if - I would avoid this, and prefer to use an extensibility model. Mono supports the Managed Extensibility Framework, which provides a good way to "plug in" platform specific code at runtime.

Related Solutions

C# – Best practices for catching and re-throwing .NET exceptions

The way to preserve the stack trace is through the use of the throw; This is valid as well

try {
  // something that bombs here
} catch (Exception ex)
{
    throw;
}

throw ex; is basically like throwing an exception from that point, so the stack trace would only go to where you are issuing the throw ex; statement.

Mike is also correct, assuming the exception allows you to pass an exception (which is recommended).

Karl Seguin has a great write up on exception handling in his foundations of programming e-book as well, which is a great read.

Edit: Working link to Foundations of Programming pdf. Just search the text for "exception".

C# – .NET String.Format() to add commas in thousands place for a number

String.Format("{0:n}", 1234);  // Output: 1,234.00
String.Format("{0:n0}", 9876); // No digits after the decimal point. Output: 9,876

Best Answer

Related Solutions

C# – Best practices for catching and re-throwing .NET exceptions

C# – .NET String.Format() to add commas in thousands place for a number

Related Topic