Some of you may remember an old Windows program of mine called Hash Verifier. It was a graphical utility that allowed people to generate hashes of their files, and then compare those to known hashes, ensuring that their files had not been corrupted. Well in recent months my foray into the world of Linux has finally taken me into the realm of programming on that platform. Being primarily a .NET developer on Windows I have found the Mono project on Linux to be an absolute breath of fresh air.
“Monkey” project
The Mono project is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET common language runtime and a C# compiler. On Linux the easiest way to program in a Mono language is within the project’s own integrated development environment called MonoDevelop.
C is a sharp language
C# is a very powerful programming language that falls somewhere between C and Java in terms of syntax. While my experience with C# has been limited in the past, I was easily able to pick it up quickly thanks to my background in both C and Java, as well as fellow .NET language Visual Basic.
The challenge
Digging up an old .NET project of mine, Hash Verifier, I decided to challenge myself to port the application to Mono. In order to do this I needed to accomplish the following:
- The original application ran on Microsoft’s .NET on the Windows platform. The new application must run on both .NET on Windows and Mono on supported platforms.
- The original application was written in Visual Basic. The new application must be written in C#.
- The original application has a GUI powered by the native Windows.Forms. The new application needs to have a GUI that works in a similar way on all platforms.
- The new application must be able to fully re-create all of the old application’s features and functions.
Porting = easy
I must say that porting this old application to C#/Mono was a relatively straightforward task. Although I had plenty of GUI toolkits to choose from I ended up sticking with the existing Windows.Forms. Once I had decided on using Windows.Forms as the basis for my GUI (WinForms is a free and open source implementation for non-Windows users!) I set out to create my new application. I was literally able to open the old Visual Basic GUI designer file, copy the code into my Mono workspace, change the syntax to C# and voila it worked!
In fact the only tricky part was trying to figure out a compatibility issue that .NET/Mono 2.0 seem to have with the new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). I’ll save you the gory details but basically drag and drop functionality would not work. I eventually rectified this issue by including a compiler flag telling .NET/Mono to execute the form in single thread apartments mode. You can see where I did this in my code by looking right above my static main function:
[STAThreadAttribute]
public static void Main()
{
…
}
Final result
With the application complete I must say I am impressed. Crafting and running applications for Mono is extraordinarily simple to do, seems very powerful, and the application itself only takes up a couple of MiB to run. In the future I definitely plan on doing more of this type of development now that I am using different operating systems every day.
Hash Verifier
If you are still using the old version of Hash Verifier, or if you would just like to try it out you can download the new Hash Verifier in two different ways. The package marked binary only contains just the program itself and the relevant documentation. The package marked all contains both the program, documentation as well as the source code.
Requirements:
- All platforms: .NET 2.0+ / Mono, a graphical display
- *nix platforms: WinForms (identified as System.Windows.Forms)
