Porting an MVC4 App from VisualStudio to MonoDevelop

I recently created a demo shopping cart application using VisualStudio Express 2013 and MVC4. This meant spending some time in Windows.  But, I was quite impressed with MVC4. This is a vast improvement over the old viewstate based web apps. Plus, there is asset bundling support. This was worth the time spent using Windows.

When I was done, I wanted to log back into my Linux machine and port my project to Mono. The first thing I did was upgrade to Mono 3 and MonoDevelop 5. And then I set about porting my demo. MonoDevelop only has MVC3 templates, so first, I had to find an MVC4 template, Now I was ready to get started.

With most IDE's, you can just drop files into a folder and forge ahead. But MonoDevelop uses the VisualStudio project structure that mirrors the file system. So I  fired up MD, loaded my template, renamed it, and deleted all of the boilerplate. Then I visited each project folder, right clicked, selected Add Files from Folder, and dragged in all of the source from my original project.  This worked for everything except the Model.

Since Linux doesn't support MSSQL, I decided to use MySQL, with NHibernate for my ORM. I prefer a database first design process, so the first thing I did was update the sql script that creates my database and stored procs. Then I copied in the domain objects created by EntityFramework, changing the properties to virtual. The real work was creating the xml bindings -  but I actually prefer doing it manually, it is much easier to update than the tedious VisualStudio process of deleting and rerunning the wizard. Plus, you have much more control over the final product.

Thas is it. You can see the result at http://monomart.apphb.com. And compare the projects on github. The original VS project is at https://github.com/darkoverlordofdata/minimart, and the MonoDevelop project is at https://github.com/darkoverlordofdata/monomart.