Comments: Building Mono in Windows for 2006

AWESOME!

I'd also be interested in the Cygwin installer work which you did. I spent a few days a few years ago diving through how the Cygwin Installer worked, because I wanted an unattended installation mode for use on the University campus on which I worked at the time. I eventually gave up.

I'm a Linux user at heart, but my work Laptop must remain Windows, so being able to hack on Mono core in Windows will be excellent.

Posted by Jay R. Wren at January 9, 2006 07:59 PM

Nice msys/mingw bundle ...

Posted by Andy Burns at January 10, 2006 02:58 AM

That installer is great! That's the installer the MinGW team should have built. That way everyone can use the installer, and for other projects than mono, too! Btw, did you look at WiX for installer framework, too?

Posted by Michael Fink at January 10, 2006 04:51 AM

Yes, this is important. I also use Windows for my day-to-day job and when I helped out with a lot of bugs before the Mono 1.0 launch in the first half of 2004, I was running Linux on a virtual machine so I could build it.

I have never tried to build it on Windows because I have always considered setting up the build environment to be too much hassle.

Having a very small install that would let me just build MONO would definately help get me to install it on my main laptop.

Posted by David Taylor at January 10, 2006 06:20 AM

I'm a heavy Cygwin user, and have been for years. Bash running in rxvt is the only command line I use, whether on X/Linux or Win2K/XP/2003. It's great for uniformity of interface everywhere.

The problem I have with the current drawbacks of Mono is that I can't build Mono on my Cygwin installation, and I'm not prepared to regress elements of my Cygwin installation just to suit Mono. So, I don't do any Mono development, even though I work on compilers and runtimes professionally in my day job.

I hope the problem with Mono and Cygwin coexisting can be sorted out, but the sorting out (from my perspective at least) will have to be done by either the Mono people or the Cygwin people, not by the consumers / developers (i.e. people like me). Expecting people who download the software to worry about configuring their system to suit the software would be no way to run a sofware business, and open source shouldn't be any different.

That sounds a little harsh, because it's only the build environment that requires the special Cygwin setup, while the runtime / compiler installation is fairly hassle-free. It does reflect my annoyance, though.

Posted by Barry Kelly at January 10, 2006 07:40 AM

Awesome.

How about adding pkg-config?

I'm not that familer with Mono - tonight is my first time attempting to build. Is anyone building with Visual C++? Is there a Visual Studio .sln that can build mono (using 3rd party tools?)

Thanks a lot!

Posted by Nick at January 11, 2006 12:21 AM

Paco, buddy, happy New Year! (says he, 13 days late)

I am glad for the efforts you are making on building Mono from source on Windows.

You see, everything you learn, helps **me** make SNAP Platform easier to build from source on Windows. :-)

But seriously, I'd like to encourage you to keep trying. Making Mono on Windows easy to build is essential to making sure Mono is available for future generations of Mono on Windows users.

At any rate, I'm giving this installer a whirl today. And maybe it will be of help to me and SNAP Platform too! I'll let you know how that goes.

Posted by PJ Cabrera at January 13, 2006 01:45 PM