Mono on OS X Compatible with MSVC 2010 peer-to-peer servers?

Question

I have to start developing .NET at work, but I am able to use MonoDevelop / Mono on OS X instead of MSVC 2010 on Windows and would prefer it because of my acquaintance with OS X. We will most likely use a number of popular frameworks such as NHibernate and Castle DI are my question for anyone familiar with .NET and Mono development: am I really at a disadvantage? Are there strong incompatibilities or, with some “paper cuts”, are the two systems roughly compatible? Again, my colleagues will use MSVC 2010, and we intend to work together on the same codes.

Thanks for any insight you can give this .NET newbie.

EDIT: I should note that I will primarily be engaged in development with MVC 2, which, as I understand it, works with Mono and will have a lee approach when choosing frameworks, i.e. I can avoid extremely incompatible frameworks.

Answer 1

Mono Migration Analyzer can help you figure out if you use libraries that will not run in Mono.

MonoDevelop is becoming quite feature-rich. I did not have many problems with this.

Answer 2

I can offer a limited case study - I was a developer of tools in a large gaming company, using .NET / Visual Studio for 5 years. I recently left to help create a small new studio - we use the Unity engine, which uses Mono as the basis for scripting. I have been working with Mono for about 8 months now, and none of the .NET libraries that I discovered that I want to use had any incompatibilities that I noticed.

A fairly limited selection, however, is unlikely to cover all of your use cases - basically just System, System.IO, System.Xml, System.Web, System.Collections (.Generic) and other basic things.

Mono-development has so far been reasonable, but not as functional as VS.

Disclaimer: we do not cross compile with MS.NET and Mono.

Answer 3

MonoDevelop can easily open VS 2010 projects.

However, you cannot graphically develop WinForms with mono.

Nhibernate works, but debugging with MonoDevelop is difficult and not working.

In other words: It is possible, but you have a certain drawback.