General .NET links
Some general .NET links for developers and newbies:
Prerequisites
You must install either the .NET Framework SDK, or the .NET Redistributable.
Both of them are available in localized versions from Microsoft Downloads, or
may already be on your machine (eg. with the MS Developer Studio 7.0 or as a
recommended update)
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Microsoft
.NET Redistributable (20 MB)
This package contains the common runtime and a few tools localized to some major
languages, but it doesn't contain any developer software or documentation, so I
would suggest you go for the next item instead.
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Microsoft
.NET SDK (130 MB)
This contains everything from the redistributable plus a complete (and FREE!!)
developer environment with compilers, debugger, make, tools, and lots of
documentation. If you don't mind the 100mb download you should go for this
package.
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MDAC >= 2.6 (5 MB)
For some XML functionality, you might need to install the current MDAC
(Microsoft Data Access Components). The installer will ask you to have at least
version 2.6 installed, so you should get the latest 2.6 Service Release or the
2.7 version (if you do not need 100% MSSQL backward compatibility).
Alternative CLRs
There are also implementations of the the .NET Framework available for Linux,
BSD and others. I have not yet tested any of these, but I'm quite sure that
there will be good alternatives to the official Win32 version in the near
future:
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The Mono project
mono:: is still working to complete the class library, but they have already a
self-hosting C# compiler, JIT and Interpreter. Quite impressive.
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Microsoft
Rotor
This is Microsoft's open source implementation of the CLI, which can be build on
BSD and Win32. More information and an interview is available from
O'Reilly. New: There is a refresh release dated 06/26/2002 on
the above download link!
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Rotor for Linux
This is the second release of Microsoft's Shared Source CLI, modified to work on
a Linux-based operating system. So far, the entire tree builds (There are still
a number of preprocessor errors on RedHat.), and hello.exe works as expected.
Running the full clr test suite (~2200 tests) currently (September 2002) yields
~40 failures on RedHat, about ~30 on Debian.
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DotGNU Project and the
DotGNU Portable.NET
I have no idea how far these guys are with their own implementation...
Useful Tools
I use these free tools regulary for .NET development:
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FxCop
A code analysis tool that checks for conformance to the .NET Framework Design
Guidelines . It uses reflection, MSIL parsing, and callgraph analysis to
inspect assemblies for more than 175 defects in the following areas: naming
conventions, library design, localization, security, and performance.
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NAnt
"NAnt is a free .NET build tool. In theory it is kind of like make without
make's wrinkles. In practice it's a lot like Ant." It also has some useful
tools to generate NMAKE compatible makefiles from Developer Studio Solution and
project files (look for SLiNgshoT in Extras).
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NDOC (formerly DOC.NET)
NDoc builts documentation from C#'s XML Documentation and the assemblies
metadata. The output looks very similar to the MSDN Framework Documentation,
which is transparently linked with the generated and compiled output files.
NDoc can also generate JavaDoc-style output.
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NUnit
A clone of the well known JUnit testing framework to write repeatable unit tests
in any .Net language.
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SharpDevelop IDE
SharpDevelop aims to be a free editor for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's
.NET platform. It has a very impressive list of features and works very stable
for me.
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