The motivation

The obvious question here is why would you want to develop .NET software on Linux or for Linux? At the risk of sounding like throwing buzzwords around, I will say it is because Linux dominates the cloud completely. Many cloud-related technologies such as Docker, Mesos, and others build on Linux as a base. Sure, it is possible to run Windows in the cloud one way or another, but it is really hard to match the flexibility of Linux, especially when running more than just a few instances.

Quite recently Microsoft announced open-sourcing of .NET Core paving new grounds for a truly cross-platform .NET implementation. It has already been possible to run a lot of .NET software on Linux and OSX for quite some time on an independent .NET implementation called Mono, and now Microsoft is saying that they will work with the Mono project on a common code base that will eventually become the .NET core. In fact, Microsoft has been close to Xamarin, a company behind Mono, for a while now, so this step is not that surprising.

But how usable is Mono right now? That is what I set out to find out in my little experiment. Read the rest of this entry »