In my last post, I profiled what you would need to do to get Visual Studio to use the Mono compiler for compiling your Mono projects. I also created 3 basic Mono project templates that are available for download.

Apparently, they have some appeal as they have been downloaded a couple of hundred times, so that’s good. :) Also, it looks as though Mono is getting some additional traction and good looks from others in the Microsoft community. That is good, it should.

I have also made it a priority for dashCommerce to run on Mono in future revs as I think this is a huge win for software products in general, but especially so for open source projects.

But, one thing that I left out of the previous post was some Mono item templates. Specifically, some standard stock templates because if you add a stock item (like a Web Form) to your project that references .NET assemblies, you will get this lovely little creature when you compile:

NETref 

Which is basically telling you that Mono has no idea what the heck the referenced assembly is! So, how to fix it? Well, you need some item templates that reference the Mono assemblies and not the .NET assemblies.

I have gone ahead and created the following templates for use in your Mono projects:

  • Class
  • Interface
  • Master Page
  • Web Content Form
  • Web Form
  • Web Service
  • Web User Control

You can download these item templates from here (as well as the Project Templates). Once you download them, you can put them in My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ItemTemplates\Visual C#\Mono and you should be good to go.

That being said, there was a recent Beta release of MonoDevelop 2.0 and I am hearing good things about it, so all this may be for naught if it is a solid IDE, but I am easing into this and frankly, I think MS and Visual Studio should support development on the Mono platform. But maybe that’s just me. :)

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