Mono Beginners HOWTO for Windows users Jaime Anguiano Olarra
jaime@geneura.ugr.es
 Hinne Hettema
h.hettema@auckland.ac.nz
 2002-08 0.1 2002-08-05 JA First release The goal of this document is to guide people through the setup of a Mono framework in a Windows box. Because some people might want to just test Mono a bit and use the compiler, etc, I have made two distinctions, one for the Mono user that only wants to get precompiled binaries and another for the one how wants to build Mono from the CVS and probably contribute to the project actively. Each kind of user has to read the corresponding part of this document. I hope a lot of Windows users will get a nice approach to the free software world by starting using Mono. Introduction Mono is an open source implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) specified in ECMA standard 335. It comes with a C# compiler and provides an extensible platform to develop and run applications that are interoperable with Microsoft .NET. Mono is not finished--it is a project still under development. As a result, installation and configuration may not be as smooth as you will be used to from other Linux or Windows applications. Nevertheless, mono is in a state that will allow you to get it up and running and gain experience with it--which is, I would suggest, a very smart thing to do. This document is aimed at the mono beginner, and aims to present a complete view of a minimal installation, which will allow you to experiment with mono to some degree. It also describes some of those experiments. We expect that after reading this document you'll go on to do either of two things: Continue to contribute to the mono project in some shape or form. The website has some ideas and suggestions under the heading 'Contributing'. Continue to write applications that run in mono. We hope this document will be useful to you in your first steps with mono. Happy hacking! Disclaimer No liability for the contents of this document can be accepted. Use the concepts, examples and information at your own risk. There may be errors and inaccuracies, that could be damaging to your system. Proceed with caution, and although this is highly unlikely, the author(s) do not take any responsibility. All copyrights are held by their by their respective owners, unless specifically noted otherwise. Use of a term in this document should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark or service mark. Naming of particular products or brands should not be seen as endorsements. Credits / Contributors Credits are due to Hinne Hettema h.hettema@auckland.ac.nz for creating the xml template I used for this document, for reviewing and make an excellent job with the other HOWTO and for his feedback. As you can see a lot of his work has been included in this document too. The Mono Hackers. Feedback Feedback is most certainly welcome for this document. Send your additions, comments and criticisms to the following email address: mono-docs-list@ximian.com. I am lurking on this list and will maintain this document as required. Installing Mono Obtaining Mono In order to obtain the required software you just need to visit the Mono download page at http://www.go-mono.org/download or any of the related sites. You'll be able to complete everything in this document if you just install the runtime, but taking a look at the compiler package is well worth the effort. The compiler is written in C# and is 'self hosting' which means it is able to compile itself. This page also lists the current versions of the software mono depends on. Make sure that your system has all the required versions, otherwise mono won't compile. Installing Mono on Windows, the easy way Oh. This is a very easy task now. If you just want to take a look at the possibilities of Mono get the Mono installer from the site of Johannes Roith <johannes\@jroith.de>: http://www.superin.informativ.net/mono/mono.htm. You can get a link in the download section of the Mono site too: http://www.go-mono.org/download Then you just need a Windows machine. Better use Windows 2000 Professional. Once you've got it, run the installer. Remember, building your own Mono runtime and compiler from the sources is strongly recommended. You won't discover the power of Mono until you get it made this way. If you feel hungry about real programming with Mono, proceed like in the next section. Building Mono under Windows 1.- Get Windows 2000 Professional or any Windows System supporting .NET SDK. Avoid using XP and the redistributable version of the SDK (necessary for WinME, etc). 2.- Get the latest Cygwin distribution, be sure you install the GNU Build Tools packages. Take the openssh package if you plan to contribute to the project. If you feel insecure about the packages you need to install, install all of them, of course, Text, Admin, Games and Web are not necessary at all and you can pass of those. The fitness of your choice will depend of your knowledge on Linux and/or Cygwin. If in doubt install all. 3.- Install the .NET SDK. 4.- Install Cygwin. 5.- Get http://www.go-mono.org/mono-build-w32.sh and put it into your home directory in the cygwin setup. 6.- Enter your cygwin environment. If you have an account in the mono cvs, then export the variables as shown in http://www.go-mono.org/ccvs.html This means. Enter: export CVSROOT=user@mono-cvs.ximian.com:/cvs/public and export CVS_RSH=ssh If you have no account DO NOTHING. 7.- Enter: export ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I /usr/local/share/aclocal" and this: export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/bin" 8.- Run the script (mono-build-w32.sh) 9.- All should work fine know and you should see it download what necessary and build mono. Troubleshooting If you have noticed problems during step 8 and the execution stops because of errors as I cannot find that or such library or alike, try to: 1.- Create a directory mono-temp for example. 2.- Move and unzip all the zips the mono-build script downloads to /usr/local to that new directory. Do it one by one, copying the content of the created subdirectories (include, bin, etc) to their respectives in /usr/local. Take care, some libraries like libglib... must go into /usr/local/bin and not into /usr/local/lib. 3.- Jump into the /usr/local/mono directory and run ./autogen.sh 4.- Then run ./configure and after it: make and finally: make install. Running mono Basic steps To work with mono, you first have to create a C# program. Open up your favourite editor, and type in the following code: using System; class Hello { public static void Main(String[] args) { Console.WriteLine("mono:: is alive and well..."); for (int i = 0; i < args.Length; i++) Console.WriteLine("Argument {0} = {1}", i, args[i]); } } Save the file as hello.cs. To compile this into a working program, type mcs hello.cs. If you get the following: mcs hello.cs RESULT: 0 you know the compile worked fine. If you see some strange error messages including the word 'parser' somewhere, you made a mistake in your program. Fix this up first. You are now ready to execute your first mono program. To execute the code, type mono hello.exe arg1 arg2 arg 3 (where we have given some arguments just for fun) and you'll see the following: mono:: is alive and well... Argument 0 = arg1 Argument 1 = arg2 Argument 2 = arg Argument 3 = 3 RESULT: 0 As you can see, mono printed the line "mono:: is alive and well" and printed the list of arguments. This completes the creation and execution of your first mono program. Interpreter But mono will allow you to do more. First of all, mono is the compiled mono execution environment which uses the Just in Time (JIT) compiler. Mono also comes with an interpreted environment, which can be accessed using the command 'mint' as follows mint hello.exe arg1 arg 2 mono:: is alive and well... Argument 0 = arg1 Argument 1 = arg Argument 2 = 2 As you can see, it makes no difference to mono output which environment you use, but what happens under the hood is very different. If you use 'mono' as the command line tool, you call the 'production' execution environment which will read your portable executable (PE) file, and call the just in time (JIT) compiler to compile the PE code down to machine level code (in my case, an x86 architecture) after which it is executed. If you use mint, the JIT is not used, and the PE code is interpreted into x86 instructions for execution. In fact, for our simple 'hello' mint is slightly faster. The point is that the JIT compiler will take some time to compile the code of our program and store it in some location in memory, but the subsequent execution of the code is faster with mono. After this simple run of mono, it is time to play with some options. I won't cover these in detail since there are quite a few, and also because I assume you downloaded mono to hack it around in the first place. So I'll leave some pointers. Debugging Mono supports a debugging option when you specify the "-d" flag while running the runtime. Utilising this flag will get you a significant amount of output, and it may be an idea to specify an output file as well. The interesting aspect of this file is that it allows you to see to some extent (quite precisely, actually) what the JIT compiler is up to. Statistics It is also possible to collect some runtime statistics on your program. These will give you some idea of the resource utilisation of your program. mono --stats hello.exe mono:: is alive and well... RESULT: 0 Mono Jit statistics Compiled methods: 58 Methods cache lookup: 15 Method trampolines: 698 Basic blocks: 188 Max basic blocks: 15 Allocated vars: 238 Analyze stack repeat: 61 Compiled CIL code size: 2450 Native code size: 10167 Max code size ratio: 7.13 (FileStream::FlushBuffer) Biggest method: 1016 (StreamWriter::Write) Code reallocs: 27 Allocated code size: 22073 Inlineable methods: 17 Inlined methods: 22 Created object count: 18 Initialized classes: 127 Used classes: 37 Static data size: 288 VTable data size: 8292 Inspecting IL Assembly code Mono also provides a small tool that will let you disassemble the executable (.exe) file so you can have a peek under the hood. This tool is monodis, and is run as follows: monodis hello.exe .assembly extern mscorlib { .ver 0:0:0:0 } .assembly 'hello' { .hash algorithm 0x00008004 .ver 0:0:0:0 } .class private auto ansi beforefieldinit Hello extends [mscorlib]System.Object { // method line 1 .method public hidebysig specialname rtspecialname instance default void .ctor() cil managed { // Method begins at RVA 0x20ec // Code size 7 (0x7) .maxstack 8 IL_0000: ldarg.0 IL_0001: call instance void System.Object::.ctor() IL_0006: ret } // end of method instance default void .ctor() // method line 2 .method public static default void Main(string[] args) cil managed { // Method begins at RVA 0x20f4 .entrypoint // Code size 56 (0x38) .maxstack 5 .locals init ( int32 V_0, int32 V_1) IL_0000: ldstr "mono:: is alive and well..." IL_0005: call void System.Console::WriteLine(string) IL_000a: ldc.i4.0 IL_000b: stloc.0 IL_000c: ldloc.0 IL_000d: ldarg.s 0 IL_000f: ldlen IL_0010: clt IL_0012: brfalse IL_0037 IL_0017: ldstr "Argument {0} = {1}" IL_001c: ldloc.0 IL_001d: box [mscorlib]System.Int32 IL_0022: ldarg.s 0 IL_0024: ldloc.0 IL_0025: ldelem.ref IL_0026: call void System.Console::WriteLine(string, object, object) IL_002b: nop IL_002c: ldloc.0 IL_002d: ldc.i4.1 IL_002e: add IL_002f: stloc.1 IL_0030: ldloc.1 IL_0031: stloc.0 IL_0032: br IL_000c IL_0037: ret } // end of method default void Main(string[] args) } // end of type Hello This is the listing of the code of your program in a language called IL assembly, or Common Intermediate Language (CIL). The CIL provides the portability of the mono platform, and ensures that code compiled with Microsoft's .NET framework will work on mono and vice versa. Man pages Mono has man pages already installed, and generally, typing man before the command you wish to execute should help in getting a list of the options. In many cases, it's still up to you to figure out what they do. Problems With mono being as new as it is, it is likely that you will have some problems with installation. The following are some ideas to help you out in a bind: See the Ximian Bugzilla page to find out if there is a bug report about your specific issue. Read this document. If it does not solve your problem, we want to know about it. Please send a message to the email address listed for feedback at the beginning of the document. Visit the mono mailing lists' archives and do a little research in there for threads talking about the problem you have. If you still cannot correct the problem, send a message to the mono list. When you do this, please be as precise as possible--i.e. mention the system you are running, the version of mono that you have the problem with, and give any error codes and other output that might appear. Copyright and License This document, Running mono, is copyrighted (c) 2002 by Hinne Hettema and Jaime Anguiano Olarra. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License". GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.1, March 2000
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