Introduction to developing with Mono

Assemblies

Mono and .NET compile source code into ‘assemblies’. Assemblies, which are similar to collections of Java .class files, contain language-independent, platform-independent bytecode called CIL (Common Intermediate Language). Because assemblies are language independent, it doesn’t matter what language was used to create them. Assemblies made with C# can mix with assemblies created with VB.NET, Java (using IKVM), or any language that someone has written a CIL compiler for.

But, being platform independent means, of course, that assemblies need to be compiled again into native code before they can run on any particular machine. It’s important to distinguish the two compilations involved in Mono applications: from source code to byte code, and from byte code to native machine code. The first compilation is performed by the developer. The second compilation is generally performed just when the program begins executing, on the very computer that will run the application, and for this reason it’s called Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation. This second compilation and the execution of the application is performed by a Common Language Runtime (CLR).

Mono also supports Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compilation. This is a mode that pre-compiled the code, and it is useful to reduce application startup time (by eliminating the JIT startup time) and increasing the code that can be shared across multiple applications.

On Windows and Linux, as well as other operating systems, assemblies are stored in files with the .dll or .exe extension. The only difference between a .dll assembly and a .exe assembly is that a .exe assembly contains a starting point for an application (a Main method), whereas .dll assemblies only are class libraries.

Classes

An assembly contains the byte-code for classes. Classes in Mono/.NET are exactly parallel to classes in Java, C++, and other object-oriented languages. They contain constructors, methods, and fields, as with other languages, and CLR classes also contain properties and events.

Classes are grouped into namespaces (the Java equivalent of packages). The namespace of the core classes in the class library is System. Other class library namespaces include System.IO, System.Windows.Forms, and System.Xml. The full name of a class is its namespace plus its short name. The full name of the Stream class in System.IO is System.IO.Stream.

Namespaces often share their names with the names of assemblies, but don’t be misled. Although GUI classes appear in the System.Windows.Forms namespace and the System.Windows.Forms assembly, this is only an accident. The class System.IO.Stream is in the System.IO namespace, but it is found in the mscorlib assembly. When you write code (e.g. the using statement), you always deal with ‘namespaces’. When you invoke the compiler, you specify the ‘assemblies’ to load.

Hello World

Here’s a Hello World application written in C#. When the program starts, it writes “Hello, World!” to the console and exits.

// Hello World! : hello.cs
 
using System;
 
class Hello {
    static void Main() {
        Console.WriteLine ("Hello, World!");
    }
}

If you have Mono installed, you can compile this source code with the command:

mcs hello.cs

Mono’s C# compiler, mcs, creates in an assembly named hello.exe that you can execute on any platform supporting the CLR – using Mono on any supported platform, or using .NET on Windows. To run the program using Mono, type:

mono hello.exe