Can I write programs in C# on Ubuntu?

Question

I am forced to learn and practice C#, is there any applications that support and can be used to write programs in C#?

Solution 1

Yes you can use mono

For a nice IDE to work in try monodevelop:

sudo apt-get install monodevelop

This will also pull in all the necessary runtimes needed.

Solution 2

What you are looking for is Mono, which is, quoting from the project's website:

An open source, cross-platform, implementation of C# and the CLR that is binary compatible with Microsoft.NET

Mono also comes with an Integrated Development Environment (IDE): MonoDevelop. Both softwares are packaged for Ubuntu.

Mono

MonoDevelop

This last package depends on the first one. Installing this package will automatically install the other.

Solution 3

You can develop C# applications on linux with .NET Core: https://www.microsoft.com/net/core

After you install it, type dotnet new in your terminal to get a list of application templates which can be generated for you to start.

As of .NET Core 2.0 today, this is the list:

Templates                                         Short Name       Language          Tags               
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Console Application                               console          [C#], F#, VB      Common/Console     
Class library                                     classlib         [C#], F#, VB      Common/Library     
Unit Test Project                                 mstest           [C#], F#, VB      Test/MSTest        
xUnit Test Project                                xunit            [C#], F#, VB      Test/xUnit         
ASP.NET Core Empty                                web              [C#], F#          Web/Empty          
ASP.NET Core Web App (Model-View-Controller)      mvc              [C#], F#          Web/MVC            
ASP.NET Core Web App                              razor            [C#]              Web/MVC/Razor Pages
ASP.NET Core with Angular                         angular          [C#]              Web/MVC/SPA        
ASP.NET Core with React.js                        react            [C#]              Web/MVC/SPA        
ASP.NET Core with React.js and Redux              reactredux       [C#]              Web/MVC/SPA        
ASP.NET Core Web API                              webapi           [C#], F#          Web/WebAPI         
global.json file                                  globaljson                         Config             
Nuget Config                                      nugetconfig                        Config             
Web Config                                        webconfig                          Config             
Solution File                                     sln                                Solution           
Razor Page                                        page                               Web/ASP.NET        
MVC ViewImports                                   viewimports                        Web/ASP.NET        
MVC ViewStart                                     viewstart                          Web/ASP.NET        

The current latest version is 2.0 and covers all my needs.

Solution 4

You could use Visual Studio Code using apt:

wget -q https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/vscode stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscode.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install code

or snap:

sudo snap install code --classic

After the C# package installing, the next dialog box appears:

Clicking the marked button opens the next page, which provides the instructions for .Net Core SDK installation (along with ASP.Net Core runtime and .Net Core runtime installation instructions):

wget https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/19.10/packages-microsoft-prod.deb -O packages-microsoft-prod.deb
sudo apt install ./packages-microsoft-prod.deb
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install dotnet-sdk-3.1

monodevelop IDE seems is not an option now, because of I could not find it. But if you want to install the current mono version (For example, on 20.04, amd64 architecture) you could use official mono repository:

sudo apt install gnupg ca-certificates
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF
echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.mono-project.com/repo/ubuntu stable-focal main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-official-stable.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mono-devel

You could also install additional mono packages, which you could find by:

apt-cache search mono

The man mono will introduce you to its usage:

DESCRIPTION
       mono is a runtime implementation of the ECMA Common  Lan‐
       guage  Infrastructure.   This can be used to run ECMA and
       .NET applications.

View more solutions

Comments

[AmirRazoR]

i am installing Monodevelop right now, would this also install Mono, or i should run a specific command to install it?

[Andrea Corbellini]

@AmirRazoR: yes, it would install Mono. I've also updated my answer to add this information.

[fIwJlxSzApHEZIl]

I like that this answer seems to be IDE independent but I'm curious as to what kind of programs would be comfortable working with the projects generated by these commands? I didn't see support for Razor pages in MonoDevelop for instance. And VSCode still seems clunky to me with its very strict modular approach to plugins and compilers.

[Tadej]

Rider seems promising: jetbrains.com/rider but I haven't tried it yet. In the mean time I moved back to Windows, because I was missing too many features on Linux. I'm a C# developer. And Visual Studio just makes the development so much easier. I was using Sublime Text for some time on Linux.

[Gathide]

This is the one that worked for me: sudo apt install mono-devel