VSIntegration

This is a plan to define what needs to be done for a Visual Studio add-in that would allow Visual Studio developers to target Linux and Mono.

Once the plugin is installed, the following should be possible from Visual Studio:

• Deploying:
  • Deploying an ASP.NET application to a remote Linux/Mono installation
  • Deploying a Windows.Forms application to a remote Linux/Mono installation
• Execution
  • Windows.Forms applications started remotely (ssh + mono app.exe)
  • ASP.NET applications started remotely (deploy + launch local web browser).
• Debugging
  • Debugging symbols converted from PDB to MDB (Robert Jordan’s tool) during deployment (done in MonoVS/MonoAddin).
  • Executables, libraries, symbols and config files from bin/Debug transfered to the remote Linux system.
    • Might want to use zsync, but we need to implement Content-Range: support in HttpListener.
    • A simple SCP would do, perhaps in the future “rsync” could be used.
    • This tool runs on Windows, uses the MS APIs to read PDBs, and Mono APIs to generate the MDBs
  • Run .NET applications under the debugger
    • This can probably be done entirely in C# using the DebugEngineSample as a reference.
    • Write/design a protocol to communicate between VS and the remote debugger
    • Remote debugger is a thin wrapper around Mono.Debugger.dll
    • Use the Mono.Debugger.dll library to host the process
  • Start Windows.Forms application connected to the Visual Debugger.
  • Start an ASP.NET application connected to the Visual Studio Debugger.
• Packaging
  • Create Mono-compliant deployments of .NET executables
  • Create RPM and DEB packages for various distributions
    • It could be easy to ship tools that do both on a single system
    • Alternatively, for open source software, expose the openSUSE Build Service