Building Cross-Platform .NET APP Using Mono

1. Open Xamarin studio from Start Menu.
2. Go to File -> New -> Solution. Here choose the Console Application in C# language. Select the solution Directory and finally create a project named "TestConsoleApp".
   
   
   
   
3. Then, you will find the following working area with entire solution directories as:
   
   
   
   
4. You can code just like you code in .NET.
   1. using System;
   3. namespace TestConsoleApp
   4. {
   5. class MainClass
   6. {
   7. public static void Main(string[] args)
   8. {
   9. Console.WriteLine("Welcome! First Program");
   10. Console.ReadKey();
   11. }
   12. }
   13. }
5. Finally build the project using F8 and run it with F5 to see the output.
6. If the solution is compiled successfully, a TestConsoleApp.exe file is created.
   
   
   
   
7. Now, you can invoke the TestConsoleApp.exe into the Mono runtime engine by specifying the name of The executable as an argument to Mono as:
   
   Mono TestConsoleApp.exe
   
8. You can also view the assembly manifest using monodis.exe as in the following:
   
   
   

Cross-Platform Nature Testing under Linux Environment

Now let's configure the mono framework over an open-source Linux distribution operating system backtrack to execute the .NET application. So, first download the Mono binaries using the wget utility and execute these series of commands to configure it properly as:

1. mkdir MonoTest
2. cd MonoTest
3. wget --no-check-certificate https://raw.github.com/nathanb/iws- snippets/master/mono-install-scripts/ubuntu/install_mono-3.0.sh
4. chmod 755 install_mono-3.0.sh
5. ./install_mono-3.0.sh

Or we can install Mono runtime using another method. Just open the Backtrack terminal and execute these commands as follows:

Sudo apt-get install mono-runtime
Sudo apt-get install mono-mcs
Sudo apt-get install mono-gmcs

Note: Please ensure that you are connected to an internet connection during execution of the commands mentioned above. Be mindful that while installing, it might prompt you to install an extra dependent package.

Now export the previously created .NET assembly TestConsoleApp.exe to backtrack via FTP, Telnet or other ways. Now let's execute our Console Application that we created previously.

Let's Do a Windows Forms application with Mono

Let's create a standard Windows Forms application that will have some UI Controls and code to execute the logic. I will be placing two text boxes and one button control. This purpose will be to validate the correct user name and password against pre-defined values in the C# code.

It is now time to compile this Windows Forms based project under Mono. First open a Mono command prompt and compile it using the gmcs utility as follows:

Finally, we need to transfer this file champu.exe to the Linux operating system using any conduit such as a FTP server or Samba server. Once we transfer this executable file to a Linux distro, open-up the terminal under Linux and execute this command as follows;

As you can see we have successfully executed a C# created .exe package under a Linux platform using Mono.