A little flat
Feb 28, 15:22
This semester I’m taking an information design class in which we use ASP.NET/ MSSQL to build web applications. I’m really more of a PHP guy but so far I’ve made the switch to C# without excessive discomfort. The most challanging part so far has undoubtedly been trying to set up a local development machine, which will be using Mono since I use a Mac. The Mono frameworks/C# compiler binaries available at the official site seem to work perfect at at this point; I have had no problems using these tools to develop console programs.
But the ultimate purpose of learning ASP.NET is it’s understanding implications on the web application world, and therefore I needed to set up one other piece of the Mono Project, XSP, which handles the parsing of ASP.NET tags and also functions as a light-weight web server. The Mono Project’s official word on suppport for these parts under Mac OS X is “no packages are available” and on another page that a “MacOS X specific bug prevents XSP from working for now”. There are indications that the documentation on the Mono site is a little out of date, though, since it seems to have been last updated in July 2004, just after Mono 1.0 was released. I do not have an issue with the lack of a working binary as much as the complete lack of information about how to get this software running. Projects will often have a little blurb about a certain platform being unsupported, but a link to a place where unofficial, unsupported ports can be found. No such luck in this case. In fact, I was rather surprised by the entire situation, in which even Google was of little help. I was able to uncover lots of usenet posts that referenced Mono and Mac OS X, as well as a few blog posts, but most of these were at least as old as the information on the official Mono site. And none of them dealt with the problems I would encounter later when trying to compile manually.
I ended up using Darwinports to install XSP and mod_mono, since my attempts to compile from the official source were unsuccessful. There is also an Apache module available for parsing ASP.Net pages, but was tempermental and stubborn and I never have gotten it to work properly. (I have been told since that mod_mono/Apache harmony is reached by compiling Aache with mod_mono, and ensuring that mod_mono isn’t unloaded each time it is used. I haven’t had time to test this yet.)
At this point I can now locally test ASP.NET pages. I’m convinced that the Mono Project is developing some great technology, but their documentation is still rather lacking. I hope it improves in the future. It’s a shame to see a project with such potential neglecting such simple aspects of its existance.