Mono on a Mac….. sort of

Well, I’ve been mucking with .NET at work for a while now, but on the Mac
at home I’ve been Java and Objective-C for the fun stuff. I decided that
it would be interesting and useful if I could try out at least SOME of the
things at work on the Mac at home. Good theory.

The mono package for OS X 10.3 works decently well actually. mcs (the C#
compiler) seems to handle the bulk of really simple examples, and mono
(the runtime) can execute the same stuff. So far so good. Now to try the
heavier lifting.

Start with the tools. NAnt. Crap. Full stop. This thing will not compile
under Mono on Mac (Fileset # of args invalid) and the precompiled
binaries will not run on mono on the Mac (reflection exception). Haven’t
tried NUnit, but without NAnt, doing much of anything useful will be a
bit of a pain.

NAnt is a hell of a tool. But there’s certainly something odd about the
defacto open source build environment that would not compile under the
1.1 framework at all, and that won’t cleanly compile or run under an
otherwise seemingly decent version of mono. Heck I got the database
connection and ADO.NET stuff working to Postgres without any issues at
all. What code-fu is NAnt doing that makes it so ill-tempered?

Ah well. Back to Java and Objective-C goodness. I can always VPN to the
office and remote desktop to do the .NET stuff. It’s sure not worth the
effort at this point to muck with it on the Mac. It’s just not mature
enough yet for anyone except the people who want to build it. I hope
they continue, but I’ve got little enough time and too many projects on
the list to add mono. Sorry. And don’t even get me started about that
abysmally documented effort of DotGNU. Great idea. Make it a fink
package or some sort of package that works. Setting up darwinports is an
adventure in mailing list scouring. ARGH.