Goodbye MS Visual Studio & .NET, Hello Mono Stack + Lucid Lynx!

I'm originally from the MS world. Don't fault me it was the time that I grew up. My generation had pretty much grown up eating up MS products without any knowledge of anything else. So naturally while doing a CS undergrad I learned classic ASP and out of school started with .NET 1.1.

The last two or so years I've had the pleasure of working at a company that is solely open source. At first I hated it. Everything seemed soooo much harder. You had to configure this and configure that and I absolutely hated the linux command terminal. Little did I know it was my ignorance that made me hateful. Not before long, I fell in love with the terminal. Then I fell in love with Java and JEE. Open source simply fits the personalities of true developers better. I would of told present day me off 2 years ago, but it's true. MS creates inferior developers.

Anyway, recently I got a project that was .NET. I had heard of Mono before but I actually got a chance to work with it. Let me tell you that it's awesome!!! Sure it doesn't have all the bloat that VS has but that bloat is unnecessary anyway for most things I work on. It's faster than VS2008. NUnit hooks in beatifully, unlike the MS Test project that is super bloated and slow. It has all types of engineering goodies like LOC, Cyclomatic Complexity, etc.

Anyway for the full stack you gotta get:

1. Mono - Runtime
2. MonoDevelop - IDE
3. MonoDevelop-Nunit - NUnit integration for IDE
4. Nunit - Command line NUnit
5. NAnt - Build tool
6. XSP2 - Mini Web/App server for asp.net

If your on Ubuntu 10.04 follow these steps:

1. Add deb

http://badgerports.org lucid main

to

/etc/apt/sources.list

2. Run following commands

gpg --keyserver http://badgerports.org/directhex.ppa.asc --recv-keys 0E1FAD0C
gpg --export --armor 0E1FAD0C | sudo apt-key add -
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install monodevelop
sudo aptitude install monodevelop-nunit
sudo aptitude install nunit
sudo aptitude install nant
sudo aptitude install mono-xsp2

That's it. I guarantee it'll be installed before you get through the first 5-10 minutes of VS2008 if you have good bandwidth.