Porting C# code to run on OSX

We have a console app that runs in .NET 3.5. It connects to a USB device and spits out data received from it.

I'd like to port this over to OSX and have some questions about the strategy to do this. The USB Driver is already installed on OSX.

Mono looks promising but I don't get it. Does the end user have to install Mo开发者_Go百科no or run something?

After looking at some other posts it seems that you can write a bash script and do some hacking to get the program installed...but I can't find a really good explanation of this. it also seems that mono wouldn't be installed in this process. These posts were also from '09 so I'm wondering if something has changed to make this easier.

My question is, what's a good way to approach running/porting a C# console app to OSX.

.NET is compiled down to IDL (bytecode) on all platforms including the windows platform. It is then run on the CLR (common language runtime iirc) which is a similar concept to the Java Virtual Machine. It just so happens that on most Windows machines that this CLR is installed by default. So if you wish your application to run on another platform you first need a CLR for that platform. Mono does include a CLR which can run on OSX. So either you (as part of your package/ bundle ) or the user would need to install this before your .NET will run.

The other issue you have is that .NET also contains certain API's which are not part of the ECMA standard which your application may or may not use. Some of these API's are present in mono, some of them are not. Those that are not usually have an equivalent or similar API which you can use to achieve the same thing however you may need to alter your application to deal with that scenario.

It really depends on what .NET api's your application is using as to how difficult it will be to port. I am guessing you are probably using winforms as part of your application so here is the guide from the mono site for that portion of the API

http://www.mono-project.com/Guide:_Porting_Winforms_Applications

You can bundle the Mono installer with your application (or your own build of Mono). You might even have the option of statically linking the mono runtime into your application on the Mac, I can't remember if it's supported (yet) or not. I'm pretty sure you can.

Also, wrt gordatron's warnings, if you use Path.Combine() to create paths instead of hard-coding \ as your path separator (which you should be doing anyway), you won't have to worry about having file system path problems.

For a nice easy way to check if your app uses any features which aren't available in Mono, you can use http://www.mono-project.com/MoMA to check for unsupported methods/classes and any other potentially non-cross-platform blockers like P/Invokes.

For a console application, I don't see you running into many issues (although you'll likely need to interface with the USB hardware differently than you do in Windows).