C# in Linux, iOS and Android

C# programming in Linux is not very developed compared to that in Windows. We do not want to completely skip it, so we will give some guidelines on how to start programming in C# in Linux, iOS and Android.

The most important thing that we need in order to write C# code in Linux is a .NET Framework implementation. Microsoft .NET Framework is not available for Linux but there is an open-source .NET implementation called “Mono”. We can download Mono at its official website: http://www.mono-project.com. Mono allows us to compile and execute C# programs in a Linux environment and on other operating systems. It contains a C# compiler, a CLR, a garbage collector, the standard .NET libraries and many of the libraries available for .NET Framework in Windows like Windows Forms and ASP.NET.

Mono supports compiling and running C# code not only in Linux but also in Solaris, Mac OS X, iOS (iPhone / iPad) and Android. The iOS version (MonoTouch) and the Android version of Mono (Mono for Android) are commercial projects, while Mono for Linux is open-source free software.

Of course, Visual Studio does not work in Linux environment but we can use the #Develop or MonoDevelop as C# IDE in Linux.