I have been primarily doing all of my .NET projects on my Windows machine but lately, since I use my Mac for everything else, it has become a chore to switch back and forth. The easiest way to handle this would probably be to install something like Parallels Desktop or use Boot Camp but it would mean I would have to buy and install Windows, which would go against my ultimate plan to ween myself off Windows. A look around the interwebs led me to Mono – “an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .Net Framework” Bingo! So here are the steps I took to create a .NET development environment on my Mac OS X v.10.6.7.
- Download and Install the latest version of Mono.
- Download and install the latest MonoDevelop IDE.
- Create the basic Hello World program to ensure that everything was installed correctly
- Visit the official Mono site for more information.