I have a Macbook Pro, and I primarily run bootcamp/Windows 7 on it. This is mainly because I use Visual Studio and C# a lot. I feel like the Mac side is a bunch of potential I'm wasting so I was wonderin if there was a way to use C# on it.
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Are there any options for using C# on a Mac OS?
Started by Slateboard, Feb 12 2012 11:11 PM
9 replies to this topic
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#2 Members - Reputation: 280
Posted 12 February 2012 - 11:17 PM
You can use Mono and MonoDevelop (SharpDevelop?) I think. I've never used them myself, but I've seen people use them.
I don't know what people use for gamedev though, as in cross platform libraries. There was the Tao framework, but I seem to recall hearing it was deprecated in favor of something else..? There's SDL.NET which is a .NET friendly wrapper around SDL, which I'm guessing is cross platform. There have also been attempts/projects to port XNA, but I'm not sure how that's going.
I don't know what people use for gamedev though, as in cross platform libraries. There was the Tao framework, but I seem to recall hearing it was deprecated in favor of something else..? There's SDL.NET which is a .NET friendly wrapper around SDL, which I'm guessing is cross platform. There have also been attempts/projects to port XNA, but I'm not sure how that's going.
#3 Members - Reputation: 104
Posted 13 February 2012 - 06:41 AM
Actually there was just a session at the AltDevConf about using Mono for games. 
Cross Platform Game Development in C#
by Matthieu Laban, Philippe Rollin, and Miguel de Icaza
They'll be posting videos on Youtube soon I believe so you can still watch it.
Cross Platform Game Development in C#
by Matthieu Laban, Philippe Rollin, and Miguel de Icaza
They'll be posting videos on Youtube soon I believe so you can still watch it.
#4 Members - Reputation: 397
Posted 13 February 2012 - 06:44 AM
I have a Macbook Pro, and I primarily run bootcamp/Windows 7 on it. This is mainly because I use Visual Studio and C# a lot. I feel like the Mac side is a bunch of potential I'm wasting so I was wonderin if there was a way to use C# on it.
Do you want to write C# FOR mac or ON mac?
Because since you mention visual studio if it's only the later you can develop in visual studio targeting .net as usual, as long as you don't use anything microsoft proprietary that wasn't ported to mono (wpf xna etc) your exe/dll should run "as is" on mac/linux etc if mono is installed without recompiling.
#7 Members - Reputation: 600
Posted 13 February 2012 - 11:33 PM
Yeah here's a link to the slides "Mono for games"Actually there was just a session at the AltDevConf about using Mono for games.
Cross Platform Game Development in C#
by Matthieu Laban, Philippe Rollin, and Miguel de Icaza
They'll be posting videos on Youtube soon I believe so you can still watch it.
Owning a mac myself you're better off learning Objective-C for native development for anything serious.
Last time I tried mono on mac it was a joke since it was missing so much stuff and so far behind what was available on Windows.
Sort of like trying to use Objective-C on Windows. Although possible via Gnustep it's a joke since it's missing Cocoa which is what really gives the language it's power just as the .Net give C# it's power!
Then again there was nothing like MonoGame around either so maybe there is hope?
Besides Miguel de Icaza hasn't let anyone stop him from trying to improve Mono and he's been working on it since I can remember so maybe they are making some progress?
Don't talk about writing games, don't write design docs, don't spend your time on web boards. Sit in your house write 20 games when you complete them you will either want to do it the rest of your life or not * Andre Lamothe
#8 Members - Reputation: 397
Posted 14 February 2012 - 05:23 AM
Yeah here's a link to the slides "Mono for games"
Actually there was just a session at the AltDevConf about using Mono for games.
Cross Platform Game Development in C#
by Matthieu Laban, Philippe Rollin, and Miguel de Icaza
They'll be posting videos on Youtube soon I believe so you can still watch it.
Owning a mac myself you're better off learning Objective-C for native development for anything serious.
Last time I tried mono on mac it was a joke since it was missing so much stuff and so far behind what was available on Windows.
Sort of like trying to use Objective-C on Windows. Although possible via Gnustep it's a joke since it's missing Cocoa which is what really gives the language it's power just as the .Net give C# it's power!
Then again there was nothing like MonoGame around either so maybe there is hope?
Well except most of .net is actually supported, it's lacking property APIs but none of the core stuff so if deving with an open source .net framework you still get all the base .net stuff
#9 Senior Moderators - Reputation: 4741
Posted 14 February 2012 - 07:22 AM
OpenTK is a nice option for game development on Mac. I was using it successfully with Boo on my MacBook, but C# will work just as well.
Tristam MacDonald - SDE @ Amazon - swiftcoding [Need to sync your files via the cloud? | Need affordable web hosting?]
#10 Members - Reputation: 665
Posted 14 February 2012 - 09:04 AM
I'm a huge Visual Studio fan boy, but I recently tried out MonoDevelop and it was actually pretty great. The intellisense was a bit more annoying, but better than most IDEs (looking at you, Eclipse). Plus it reads and writes Visual Studio files and the binaries are usually completely interchangeable across platforms without modification.as far as writing on it, a mac has no potential. for .net nothing compares with VS, i'd jusy dual boot it or use a vm for dev
As far as game development libraries, MonoGame is pretty nice. It provides some useful features on top of OpenTK. Unfortunately if you're using sprite fonts or anything else that needs the XNA content pipeline, you're limited to authoring content on Windows and copying the compiled XNB files over to Mac.
