Introduction to Mono Your first Mono app 1514

What version did you install? The base version, if you just:

# emerge mono

will give you like 0.28 or something awful old... You will probably want to make use ofetc-portage-package.keywords to make sure you get the latest 1.0.6 version. If you feeling daring, then you can get the 1.1.4 version - this is the development version for the mono 1.2 release. 1.2 should have System.Windows.Forms support and also have implemented the C# 2.0 spec - adding things like generics, anonymous methods, partial types, etc.

Also, you will probably want to make sure you merge some of the extra stuff, like glade-sharp, gtk-sharp, etc. if you want to do any sort of gui development. An easy way to do this is really to:

# emerge monodevelop

and make the appropriate entries in the packages.keywords file so that you get a smoth install. After that, you'll want to:

# emerge glade

This will let you use glade coupled with the glade-sharp library to build your gui's using the glade gui designer. It is actually really slick. I've been working on a little gui front end for bzfs (bzflag server) using this method, and it actually makes the work go much, much faster. Anyway, there you have it. If your interested in really seeing what mono can do, these are the tools I recomemend. If you don't like using monodevelop - there is always vim :) And, the great thing is that gentoo's vim comes with a pretty good syntax highlighting file for C#...

-- Tom Shelton