Unshaved yaks with MonoDevelop (and some pre-shaved ones, too)

There’s a cool Cloud Foundry fan site called preshavedyak.com – and last week at SourceDevCon London, we challenged a bunch of developers to earn themselves a nice new preshavedyak hoodie by registering for a Cloud Foundry beta account and seeing how quickly they could get a “hello world” app up-and-running in the cloud. The event saw a bunch of new signups and some great discussions.

The “pre-shaved yak”, of course, is one aspect of what a polyglot open source PaaS is all about – delivering a ready-made, ready-to-host, application runtime environment. We shaved the yak, so you can just go ahead and get productive with your development tool of choice, be that vi or emacs, Notepad or TextMate, or Eclipse / a.n.other IDE. Grab a micro Cloud Foundry VM image and take your pre-shaved yak with you when you’re not connected! 🙂

I actually started to write this post in order to comment on something that’s a bit more hairy that, though! I’ve been playing around a little bit with MonoDevelop and ASP.NET (for reasons that will become apparent during this week, I suspect). I’m using the current stable Mono (2.10) and MonoDevelop (2.8) packages on Lion, and they seem to work well. I’ve also recently been learning about Sinatra, the lightweight web framework for Ruby, and one of the node.js equivalents called Express. It turns out that the .NET world has a bunch of Sinatra-wannabes, the most popular of which appears to be Nancy (see what they did there…? dive into the world of Sinatra-themed name-related web frameworks…!).

Nancy’s site recommends installation via NuGet, which is evidently really well integrated into Visual Studio (NuGet is the equivalent of gem in Ruby, or npm in node.js). Unfortunately there’s no MonoDevelop equivalent. Here’s where the yak shaving started! The NuGet FAQ claims that the command line NuGet.exe will run and can be compiled under Mono, but in my experience, that’s not quite true – I could not get the source to compile in MonoDevelop on OS X. I grabbed the pre-compiled version and followed the instruction to get it to update itself (basically you just run it, and it bootstraps and downloads the latest available)… that went fine, but after that, it would no longer work and produced a huge stack trace.

So here, after getting most of a yak’s fleece all over me, is the secret. The prebuilt NuGet.exe will work under Mono on OS X, but it does require a Windows .NET 4.0 DLL (Microsoft.Build.dll) to be in the same directory / locatable in the path – I grabbed mine from my Windows VM install. It also requires that you tell Mono to present a v4.0 runtime. So I whipped up a tiny script to avoid having to type a bunch of paths and switches each time.

Further results of this recent dalliance in .NET land will be coming soon…